


Who You Are Inside

by torolulu



Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-24 15:12:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2586053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/torolulu/pseuds/torolulu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A judge's change of heart after witnessing firsthand the consequences of her harsh ruling results in Beecher being resentenced and released on parole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who You Are Inside

**Author's Note:**

> On the timeline: Takes place around mid-season two, in an alternate universe in which Keller does not commit (or, at least, isn't caught for) the robbery and murder that land him in Oz.
> 
> On the content: This story involves suicide and alcoholism, and makes reference to past rape. (Not explicit description, in that last case, but rather acknowledgement of canon events.) It also contains violence and explicit sex.

Here's the story, the whole sordid story, from beginning to end: A man walks into a prison. A year and a half later, he just walks out. 

No, he doesn't escape. They let him leave. They _let_ him.

Wait, no. No, no, no: no one _lets_ him do anything anymore. They usher him. They escort him. They politely show him the exit and hold the door for him while he exercises his right to leave. 

Goodbye, Oz. Hello, fresh air. God bless you, Judge Grace Lima, you self-doubting cunt. 

And look at that: the sun, shining down on him, bright and hot. Really, it's too much. He would have taken rain—been happy with it, even—but he's certainly not going to complain, not even if the sun burns him. He _wants_ it to burn him. He wants it to burn his skin until it peels right off.

 _I am standing in the sun_ , he thinks, and that thought is so big that he can't think anything else for a long time. 

_I am standing in the sun_.

He was in the dark for so long. He has been locked alone in a windowless hole. Now he is standing in the sun. What is the past year and a half next to that simple fact? 

_I am standing in the sun._

There. The end.

*

Here's a brand new story: it begins with a man standing in the sun. He tilts his face toward it and holds his arms outstretched as though he is waiting for the rays of light to carry him up to heaven. Maybe he is. More likely, he is enjoying the novelty of stretching his arms out to their full length beside him without touching any walls. He can feel his face redden where there is no beard to cover the skin and he knows that freckles are forming across the bridge of his nose, right where his glasses will sit. Soon his hair will start to get lighter. 

A hand touches the man's shoulder. He flinches and slaps it away. “Don't touch me,” he spits, automatically, whirling around to face his attacker head on.

“Toby?” 

A woman's voice. Of course. Of course, _of course_. Doesn't he feel stupid, now?

Remnants of sunlight still flash and float in Tobias's field of vision. He blinks and they wipe away like dust off a photograph he hasn't looked at in—how long? A year? No, longer.

“Genevieve,” he says. “I wasn't sure you'd come.” He laughs a little; slumps his shoulder and bows his head; tries to make himself look small so that she'll stop looking at him _that way_ : people look at Schillinger that way, at Adebisi. Not at him. Never at him. No matter how much he wanted them to.

“Well,” Genevieve says, laughing a little herself, “here I am.” Her eyes have settled on the lower half of his face and she wrings her hands together as though she's afraid that she'll have to touch him again if she leaves them unoccupied; but she's smiling and when he takes a step toward her she doesn't take a step back. And she's here—she came for him. That's something, in itself.

After several false starts, they fall into a loose embrace; then a tight one; finally, they kiss. 

“This,” Genevieve says, gesturing toward Tobias's ragged beard, “is going to have to go.”

They both laugh again, sincerely this time, happy to no longer be strangers.

“Anything for you,” Tobias says. He kisses her again and she squeals in mock-horror as the coarse hair scratches her face. 

He means it, though. She came back for him, didn't she? Anything, anything for her. 

“Come on,” Genevieve says, taking his hand. “Someone's waiting for you in the car.” Hand in hand they walk to where the family car is parked. In front of him,Tobias spies the tops of two golden heads just barely high enough to be visible through the rear windshield. He glances back up at the sky above him and then fixes his gaze on Genevieve at his side. He feels no need to look behind him, not the barest scrape of temptation, certain that there's nothing there to see but two sets of footprints manifesting without explanation in the middle of a patch of light.

*

The sun goes down that night, as it does. Tobias watches the entire process from his back porch, letting the warm colours distract him from the cold fear he's been conditioned to feel at this time of day. Red is still familiar; orange, somewhat less so; pink and purple are wonderfully novel. 

“Toby,” Genevieve calls from the back door, “the kids want you to read them a bedtime story.” 

Almost lights out—for the first time, he can't wait. Still, there's something he wants to hold onto a little longer.

“I'll be there in a minute,” he replies. He turns back to the colourful display painting the sky. Yes. He is still here. He is still standing in the sun. But this time that thought is overshadowed by an even more powerful one:

 _And_ you're _not. And you never will be_. He made sure of that. Oh, he made fucking sure.

*

Tobias is in the dark again, but he is in his own bed, and with his wife and both of these are soft and comforting; they are as real and amazing as the sun. Tobias marvels at how large the bed is, how far he has to stretch out his arm to touch Genevieve, to graze the skin of her shoulder; she's too far away to even read her expression without his glasses, not in this room lit only by the stars outside the window that dust the sky like finely ground glass, and by the hard, sharp shard of a crescent moon. Occasionally cars will pass on the quiet, residential street outside, and their highbeams will light up the room like flashlights, illuminating Genevieve's face briefly, like a ghost flickering in and out of existence. He reads something different there each time: the condescending smile of pity; a grimace of disgust; soft eyes full of compassion; an awkward, uncomfortable averted gaze. She sighs, and he wonders if it is out of resignation or delight—or is she just tired? 

Tobias suddenly realizes that _he_ is tired, that he's been so, _so tired_ for _so long_ and that it's been ages since he's been able to sleep, really _sleep_ , for hours at a time, without his back to the wall and his mind prepped to respond to any change in his environment like a tripwire being triggered. He closes his eyes and lets Genevieve sing him to sleep with a lullaby of gentle reassurances: “It's okay. We don't have to do anything. Just get some rest. It's okay. No need to rush things. We have all the time in the world.”

*

This is the dream that Tobias had on his first night of incarceration, and on every night thereafter: 

He is driving. He is drunk. The thoughts of this Tobias's real-world counterpart have been lost to the void of alcohol and trauma, so dream Tobias experiences only a pleasant blankness of thought as he pushes forward through a quiet suburban neighbourhood only a few blocks from his own. He barely registers the soft thump, clatter of metal, and screeching tires, but he can't miss what's staring him in the face: the unblinking eyes of the flesh-and-blood Raggedy Ann doll sprawled across his windshield.

The dream ends there. 

The first night of his release, Tobias doesn't have this dream—nor any other that he can remember come morning. He experiences the night as a blink—closing his eyes and then opening them, with nothing in between.

*

Tobias wakes up to sun shining through the translucent curtains and birds singing from the nest they make every year in the tree just outside the window, no matter how often he tried to move it or how many branches he cut down. God, how he used to hate those curtains, those birds. He tries to remember what it was like to be a person who could hate sunshine and birdsong in the morning; he finds that he can't and this troubles him, until he remembers that he rarely woke up in this bed without an agonizing hangover.

Tobias lies in the centre of the bed and stretches out his arms and legs, relishing the space and planning to go back to sleep, when he suddenly realizes that he is alone—or, rather, that he is not _supposed_ to be alone and that the fact that he _is_ should be a cause for concern. Reluctantly, he rolls off the bed, startled by the closeness of the bed to the floor and the warm softness of carpet where he's come to expect cold concrete. He searches the house, finding nothing, until he reaches the children's bedrooms. Tobias finds Genevieve curled up behind Holly on her little twin bed. Her face is red and puffy. He closes the door gently and returns to his room. He lies in bed with his eyes closed for an hour and a half, until Genevieve enters with a tray carrying an array of breakfast foods. Gary and Holly enter behind her, carrying, respectively, a carafe of coffee and a pitcher of orange juice. 

“Sorry I slipped out so early,” Genevieve says. “The kids really wanted to make you breakfast in bed. They were so excited. Look.” She points to something on the tray that she's placed on his lap. Tobias picks up a homemade card. “Welcome home, daddy!!!” is written across the front in crayon, above a drawing of a small, bespectacled man. Inside, Gary and Holly have written their names after the word “love”. Gary's signature covers half the paper; Holly has surrounded hers with pointy, asymmetrical hearts.

“Well, eat up,” Genevieve says. “You have a big day ahead of you.”

*

Tobias's welcome home party is well attended. “Long time, no see,” his old friends and acquaintances joke over mineral water and virgin cocktails. “Where've you been?” 

“As far as I'm concerned,” Tobias says, “I walked into a building and I walked right back out. And now you're telling me I've been gone for almost two years? Wow.”

The small group gathered around Tobias laughs and Genevieve smiles at him with what looks like affection. Tobias knows better. Affection? No: she's hiding her embarrassment. He could always tell. “That same stupid joke, over and over,” she'll say to him the next time that they're alone. “How many times am I going to have to hear it?”

(I don't know, Gen, how about until you fucking _laugh_ at it? How about until you _believe_ it?)

“Well, you did look a little bit like Rip Van Winkle at first,” Genevieve says, stroking Tobias's freshly-shaved face. The razor-burned skin of his cheek tingles but he does not flinch. Of course, of course that smile was affectionate. How could he have thought otherwise? He turns his face to kiss her hand. It is soft and it is small and he will never flinch when it touches him.

*

These are the three conditions that Tobias was compelled to accept upon being granted his release:

1\. _Acquire and maintain employment._

Easy enough. Tobias may be an ex-con, but he is still his father's son, and his Harvard Law degree is still a Harvard Law degree.

2\. _Receive regular psychiatric counselling._

This one, admittedly, is a little harder for Tobias to handle. Fortunately, Tobias's court-appointed psychiatrist is not the well of insight nor the keen detector of bullshit that a certain Sister-shrink he knew in a past life was, and he finds that the rote answers he fashions after dialogue overheard from Genevieve's guilty-pleasure TV-movie viewings are enough to satisfy the doctor's shallow probing.

3\. _Attend an addiction recovery program._

 _This_ one, though. _Fuck._ This one is the kicker. Fuck you, Judge Grace Lima, right up your dusty cunt, for this one. Tobias, would you please join this motley assortment of fuck-ups and lowlifes as they lament their lost fortunes and labour with a willful lack of self-awareness to foist the blame for their problems on to the shoulders of society, their parents, and, in one memorable case, a particularly troublesome pet dog? Oh, and Tobias, now that you've escaped from that burning building, how about you set yourself on fire?

Yet Tobias drags himself to the meetings, a picture of his family folded up and shoved in his wallet, reminding himself over and again that he'll be able to go home in considerably less time if he attends the meeting than if he refuses. He sits in the back row. He speaks only when prompted and never at length. He makes a mental game of guessing which attendees are parolees, which are here after scoring a plea bargain for a first offence and getting off with community service or time served, and whether any are those rarest and most mystifying of creatures, the non-felonious citizens who signed up of their own free will; and then dividing them further into whose table they'll find themselves sitting at when they inevitably end up in Oz. (No Aryans here, of course. No sir. Such impurity would never penetrate their ranks.)

Tobias's strategies for keeping his distance work for couple of weeks. But these scumbags, these losers, these pieces of human garbage that he could not have less in common with if he tried, have a savant-like sixth fucking sense about bullshit, being impeccable practitioners of the craft themselves, and he finds that reciting the dictionary definition of post-traumatic stress disorder any time he's asked how he feels doesn't cut it with them, no matter how many little personalized flourishes he adds. No, it's the same old story: the filth of the world demand that he strip himself naked in front of them, and he has no choice but to comply.

Take this one guy (a parolee for sure, and Tobias would bet his dewy virginal freedom that he's a repeat offender at that), who looks so white-trash and fancy-free in his undersized wife-beater that if Tobias encountered him in any other setting he would take him for an Aryan and turn tail without a second thought: ever since he showed up at Tobias's third meeting this guy has been singling Tobias out for a weekly laser-guided ball-busting.

During that first session together, for instance, the counsellor had asked everybody in the circle to share the origin story of their assorted vices: of course, out of all the evasive and purposely oblique one and two word non-answers—“fun”, “depression,” fucking “peer pressure”—this guy decided that Tobias's little half-truth was the only one that required further elaboration.

“So this 'stressful environment' that led you to graduate from alcohol to more—what's the word?—oh yeah, _illicit_ mind-altering substances: my yuppie-speak is a little rough, but we're talking prison, am I right?” 

“Yes,” Tobias answered curtly.

“So are we talking, like, minimum security?” the guy said. “They even _have_ smack at Club Fed? A sexy nurse doesn't bring you an Ambien and a finger of Scotch on a silver platter every night to send baby off to dreamland?” 

Several of the other group members laughed at Tobias. The counsellor made a weak gesture toward intervention—“That's enough, Chris, that's enough.”—before abandoning the attempt as futile; Tobias thought that he could have a bright future as a corrections officer.

“I was in Oz,” Tobias yelled over the din. It was the loudest and most forceful he'd spoken since his release. All eyes turned to him. “I was in Oz,” he said again, quieter, just for Chris. He meant to sound matter of fact, but it came out smug; it came out proud. Tobias expected shock, he expected— _hoped for_ , let's be honest here, Tobias—widened eyes and gasps of awe; and he got them, too, from everybody else in the room.

Chris, though: Chris wasn't impressed or surprised. Chris didn't reassess his first impression and look upon Tobias with new-found appreciation. Chris leaned back and laughed. “Is that right?” he said. 

The sessions after that continue in the same vein: If Tobias states that he abandoned his enabling influences in prison, then Chris wants to know who they were. (He even nods his head in recognition a few times: “Oh shit, how's _he_ doing?” To which Tobias responds with a non-committal, “Fine?”) If Tobias states that he hit rock bottom when he took a large dose of PCP and attacked a fellow prisoner, then Chris wants to know _who_ and he wants to know _how_ and he _really_ wants to know _why_. 

(“I don't remember his name,” Tobias answered. “I was hallucinating. I must have thought he was a monster or something.”

“Maybe you were right,” Chris said. )

Today's session proceeds much the same as the rest. The group members discuss their various motives for staying clean. Some say they'd like to respect themselves. Some say they'd like to keep their jobs. Some say they'd like to keep their freedom. One especially earnest speaker, apparently ennobled by a feeling of intimacy engendered by the forced sharing of personal shame and public disgrace, admits that he's deeply afraid that he doesn't really have a reason. The most common reason given, by far, is family: I want to keep my family. I want to win back my family. I want to be able to provide for my family. Tobias's answer is no different. “I just got my family back,” he tells the group, “and you can be damn sure that I'm not going to be stupid enough to lose them again.” The group applauds. Tobias feels like a good man.

Then Chris speaks. Of course Chris speaks.

“Seems to me,” he says, “that you had your family before you ever went to prison. And you were still a drunk then. So tell me, Toby: what's changed?” 

“I have,” Tobias says. “I've changed.” The group applauds again—more subdued this time, more out of politeness than genuine admiration, yet Tobias can still only barely hear Chris's murmured response:

“Yeah,” he says, “I'll bet you have.” 

*

“Do you think that I've changed?” Tobias asks Genevieve as she drives him home in the family's brand new minivan that Tobias will likely never be allowed to drive.

Genevieve considers her answer as she negotiates a particularly busy intersection. “Well,” she says. “That depends. Since when?”

“When the fuck do you think?” Tobias spits out. Genevieve jerks the steering wheel in surprise and the van swerves briefly into the wrong lane, narrowly missing a sports car whose driver honks several times and screams something obscene out his open window. “And I'm the one who's not allowed to drive,” Tobias mutters.

“Sorry,” Genevieve shouts at the sports car, despite the van's windows being closed. She makes a little open-handed ' _mea culpa_ ' gesture that she should know the driver won't be able to see in his mirror at this distance. Tobias finds himself cringing inwardly at her meekness. Does she think that this pussy in his Camaro is going to come back and fuck them up over a near-miss that didn't even graze his fuck-ugly piss-yellow paint job unless she's sufficiently nice to him? 

“Well?” Tobias says, once she seems to have regained her bearings.

“No,” she answers him. “I don't think you have.”

“Good,” Tobias says, squeezing her knee and leaning back in his seat.

“Good,” she agrees, smiling at him. 

They don't talk for the rest of the ride home. Genevieve grips the steering wheel with white knuckles and watches the road with the alertness of a rabbit in a den of sleeping wolves. Tobias keeps his eyes on the rear-view mirror, paying close attention to which vehicles seem to follow them the longest, and entertaining fantasies in which Camaro guy _does_ return to fuck them up and Tobias makes him regret it. 

*

This is the dream that Tobias has that night:

He is driving. He is drunk. There: the soft thump. There: the clatter of metal. There: the screeching tires. There, staring him in the face: himself, bearded and wild, splayed across the windshield like roadkill and screaming with a primal rage. 

He wakes up crying and alone

*

Chris doesn't show up to the next meeting. Tobias breathes a sigh of relief and settles back into his self-imposed role as a taciturn but generally agreeable patient, rattling off monosyllabic answers to soul-probing questions and willfully avoiding earnestness with the skill of an adolescent, not giving his latest tormentor a second thought. However, when Chris fails to appear a second time, Tobias reluctantly acknowledges the roots of concern that have been digging into the back of his brain. He asks the group's counsellor about Chris's whereabouts but receives only a shrug. (To Tobias's outright shock, Chris was here of his own free will.) Tobias wonders if Chris is dead or in jail. More likely, he just fell off the wagon. 

Either way, he thinks: Good fucking riddance to bad (white) trash, right?

*

Tobias forgets about Chris utterly and guiltlessly. He would lament his lack of compassion for those with less privilege and willpower, but time spent with people of actual worth blunts the rough edges that might otherwise snag at his conscience. And hasn't his psychiatrist told him of the importance of eliminating toxic influences from his life without second thoughts? Maybe the guy's not so worthless after all. Anyway, Tobias has his job and he has his family and there is simply no room in his life for anything else.

_Seems to me_

A coworker who has been on vacation since Tobias's release is in the mensroom when Tobias enters. The coworker makes a joke about dropping the soap. It is the seventh time that someone has made such a joke to Tobias. He laughs with the coworker. He always laughs when people make those jokes. He doesn't want to make them uncomfortable.

“You know,” the same coworker says to him later in the break room, “I really thought you had the potential to take this firm over when your dad retires. Are you disappointed that'll never happen now that you've been disbarred?”

Tobias laughs again, shakes his head. He tells the coworker that he is happy not to be so bogged down with work that he can't spend time with his family. The coworker agrees: family is certainly most important. But does Tobias think that the coworker might not be the obvious choice, now that Tobias is out of the running? 

“Uh, yeah, I might have heard something about that,” Tobias says. He hasn't heard anything. He doesn't pay attention to that sort of thing anymore.

“I hope so,” the coworker says. “That's what we all want, isn't it?”

_you had that before you ever went to prison_

“I hate daddy.”

Gary is crying. Gary wanted his friend Cody to come over and play but Cody's mom and dad won't let him. Cody says that it's because Gary's dad is a bad guy. Cody says his mom had a friend and Gary's dad hurt her baby.

“Daddy isn't bad,” Genevieve says, holding Gary in her lap. “Daddy would never hurt anyone, let alone a baby. Would you?”

Tobias looks at the floor and shakes his head. “No,” he whispers hoarsely, his voice strangled in his throat. He leaves the room quickly.

_and you were still a drunk._

Genevieve strokes his hair, tells him it's all right. Everything is all right. Every night, every single night: “It's all right, baby. It's all right.” Every night he's sure that he's ready. “You know it doesn't bother me, right?” ( _Liar_.) And then he's too ashamed to even take his shorts off. “It never did.” ( _Liar, liar, pants on fire_.) “I don't want to push you.”

“Of course you don't.” he says. “You might succeed. And then you'd actually have to touch me.”

For the first time that Tobias can remember, his ever prim and composed wife breaks down into tears of frustration. “I want you so much,” she sobs, taking his hand and placing it on her breast. “I love you.” ( _Hang yourself on a telephone wire_.)

“Then why did you leave me?” Tobias says, but he lets her move his hand down between her legs and feel the truth of at least one of her declarations. She answers him by burying her face in his shoulder. She's still crying when he pushes his shorts halfway down his thighs, but she grabs him eagerly and guides him into her. As he fucks her the sheets slide off their bodies. She wraps her legs around him. Her little feet push against his ass and he abruptly pulls out.

“Why would you touch me there?” he says. He hurriedly hikes his shorts back up and crosses his arms over his chest.

Genevieve wraps herself in a bedsheet and gathers her clothing off the floor. “I thought I could do this,” she says, more to herself than Tobias, before fleeing to the bathroom and turning on the shower. 

Tobias feels guiltily relieved to be alone. He falls asleep grateful that his dreams will disturb no one's rest but his own.

_So tell me Toby:_

Thunk. Clatter. Screech.

_what's changed?_

Tobias is unsurprised by the sight of Chris's baby blues gazing at him from across a cracked windshield.

“What took you so long?” he asks, but the uncooperative corpse just regards him blankly and refuses to answer.

*  
So: who the hell is this guy, anyway?

The other support group members don't know. 

The group's counsellor isn't telling. 

There is a sheet of paper tacked to a bulletin board on the wall to which members are encouraged to add their phone numbers, in case anyone in the group finds themselves on the verge of relapse and wants to be talked out of it by someone who understands what they're going through. Tobias added himself to the list only to escape the shame of being the group's only holdout, and even then he did so with extreme reluctance and the words 'EMERGENCIES ONLY I have three kids' in parentheses next to his phone number. Chris added his number to the list gladly, with verbal expressions of camaraderie and enthusiasm, but when Tobias calls it he is greeted by the manager of a nearby bar.

Tobias knows the place. He hangs up immediately.

Back to square one.

There were no obituaries for a Christopher Keller in any local papers during the last month. (Not that Tobias expects anyone would have cared enough to write one.) Nor were there any news stories in any local papers during the past month about any Christopher Keller being arrested or found dead. There are several Christopher Kellers in the phone book, but Tobias crosses each number off of his list as he listens to each unfamiliar voice. 

Well, he tried. He tried harder than anyone else in his position would— _hell, than anyone else_ did, he tells himself, giving himself a little mental pat on the back. (That he perhaps tried harder than anyone else in his position _should_ is a consideration he decides to dispense with.) Tobias has exhausted all of his avenues of investigation and to continue would be absurd. 

Chris Keller appears again that night on the windshield of his dreams, reminding him that there is one lead that he has yet to explore. By morning he knows exactly what he has to do.

*

The Waterfront Bar is slightly more upscale than the seedy dives in which Tobias has been imagining himself searching for Chris over the past few weeks, but not by any means exclusive. The working class clientele and homey atmosphere belie the bartenders' uncanny alchemical skill at combining vodka with vermouth at precisely the necessary ratio to send a man over the moon as smoothly and comfortably as possible, a single olive somehow elevating the experience to perfect bliss the way a little bit of salt sometimes does. All that for only half as much as they charge at the high-rolling bars Tobias and his colleagues usually frequent. 

_('So I might as well have two'_ , he remembers saying. 

_'Hell, you usually have two anyway, have three!'_

_'Or four! It'll be like getting two martinis for free.'_

_'It's my lucky day.'_ )

Tobias takes a bus to a stop conveniently located just down the street from the bar, glad that he's finally getting some use out of the all-access transit pass that he's been paying for every month, despite Genevieve's frequent insistence that it's no trouble at all drive him to work, rehab, everywhere—embarrassed, he assumes, to see her former lawyer husband reduced to riding public transit like any old blue collar slob. (Or maybe, it suddenly occurs to him as he approaches the bar, she was afraid of him ending up here again.) Tobias realizes that he could literally go to prison just for walking through the door. He does it anyway. 

There's a man sitting at the bar. He looks like he might be three sheets to the wind already, but his bleary eyes still light up with recognition instantly. “Toby,” he slurs. “What took you so long?”

Tobias sits down at the bar next to Chris. The bartender asks him what he'll have. Tobias had every intention of ordering a club soda with cranberry juice, but it occurs to him at that moment that he probably won't have a chance to come all the way out here again any time soon, that he didn't even bring a car, that he hates his job, that his family hates him, and that no one has seemed particularly interested in what happened to him and how he feels about it—not his wife, not his parents, not even his psychiatrist—except this irritating-as-fuck drug-addicted piece of shit wobbling drunkenly on the barstool next to his; so maybe if he wants a martini he'll just _have_ a goddamned martini. Who's going to stop him? Who can tell him, with a straight face, that he doesn't fucking _deserve_ it? 

The bartender is still looking at him, the patience trickling slowly but surely out of his face. Tobias looks at Chris imploringly. In the time that passed during Tobias's revery, Chris's facial muscles have tightened from the slack-jawed inebriation of a moment earlier into a sharp mask of calculation. The expression lasts only a fraction of a second before smoothing back out into a perfect picture of benign and convivial drunkenness. 

“Just a water for my friend here,” Chris says. 

Tobias's lungs free such a large gulp of air in one gust that he almost seems to be deflating. The sigh with which the air escapes surprises and embarrasses him; he didn't realize he'd been holding his breath. He feels as though he may have just been sentenced to death and then reprieved in a matter of minutes without his knowledge, the hangman's noose draping so briefly and lightly on his neck that he's denied both the dread of it tightening and the pleasure of relief when it slips off.

“Thanks,” Tobias says.

“Don't worry about it,” Chris says. “Guys like us need to look out for each other.”

Tobias assumes that Chris is speaking generally of alcoholics and addicts, or maybe more specifically about members of their support group, but after taking a swig of whatever tempting poison he has in that glass he continues: “Those other guys? They strut into that cozy church basement bragging on and on about the one night they spent drying out in county lock-up like they're some hard motherfuckers now. Meanwhile, you and me? You and me are the genuine fucking article and we can't say shit about it, can we?”

Tobias understands: “Guys like us”, “hard motherfuckers”, “the genuine fucking article”—these are Chris's delicate euphemisms. Guys who have been in prison. No: guys who have been fucked up the ass. His first impulse is to deny everything—“Maybe you are,” he'd say, or “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.”—and then to lock himself in the bathroom and stare into the mirror until he can figure out what gave him away and scrub it out, cut it off, do whatever he has to do to _get rid of it_. But listening to his impulses has never served him well before. 

“No,” Tobias says. “We can't.” And maybe he's been sober so long that even the smell of the whiskey wafting over to him from Chris's glass is enough to interfere with his judgement—or maybe it's something else that he's been missing, something that Chris seems to be offering him—but Tobias starts talking.

*

The buses have stopped running by the time Tobias arrives home, guiltily leaving a barely conscious Chris in the cab with enough money to get him wherever the fuck a guy like him might want to go in this family-friendly suburban neighbourhood—perhaps a sleazy motel is hiding just beyond the sprawl of mini McMansions and wastefully lush front lawns; or perhaps, Tobias considers without any real ill feeling behind it, Chris's insistence on sharing a cab was a transparent ruse to get the naive and guilt-ridden yuppie to throw a wad of cash his way—perhaps he'll stop the driver as soon as they've turned a corner and march on foot toward his next hit. 

Or maybe, like Tobias, he just wanted to bask in sympathetic company for a little longer.

Genevieve is already asleep, already in Holly's bed. Tobias is too tired to be hurt; he feels only relief at having avoided the tedious ritual that has come to dominate their evenings together. It would be wrong for a night teeming with so much harsh honesty to end with empty formalities and the rote recitation of comforting platitudes. 

Tobias collapses on the king-sized bed, selfish in his weariness, stretching his four limbs to each corner without guilt. His mind feels featherlight from confession and drifts effortlessly to a sleep that is entirely dreamless.

*

Genevieve doesn't ask about Tobias's absence the previous night, but he feels the need to explain himself regardless. He tells her the truth, to a point: that he was helping a fellow addict from his support group, a poor lost soul in the midst of crisis. That she accepts his explanation at face value is not enough to stop him from elaborating further, becoming almost belligerent in his defensiveness: “That's what what the group is _for,_ ” he says, and “You know I would rather have been with you, but I couldn't just sit there and let this guy destroy himself.” 

“Okay,” she says. “I believe you.”

Tobias swallows all the intricate arguments he's crafted in favour of his innocence with a little bit of disappointment at the mental effort going to waste. “Thanks for trusting me,” he says.

“Of course.”

Tobias wonders why she doesn't ask him why he didn't call her first, or even leave a note. He wonders why she didn't even ask him where he was. Does she not think she has the right to know? 

He doesn't ask. Better to just let her think she doesn't. Letting her know that she does might encourage her thinking to progress down a path he doesn't want it to, toward questions like “Why am I still doing this?” And what will his finely-wrought response to that be? 

_Because I want you to._

_Because I don't want to be alone._

_Because I, because I, because I._

*

Chris won't go back to rehab and Tobias is certainly not going to beg him. As much as he was looking forward to seeing the other guys' faces when his former nemesis returned as his loyal ally, attributing his newly-discovered sobriety to Tobias's unwavering refusal to give up on him, he also likes the idea of having Chris to himself. Tobias is pleased to continue meeting him every week and to serve as his one-man support group, provided that they take the bar out of the equation. Chris agrees, and they move their weekly rendezvous to a diner down the road from Chris's shitty little one-bedroom apartment (not, as Tobias already suspected, anywhere in the vicinity of Tobias's sleepy little suburb). Chris warns him that the place is a complete dive but he swears by their all-day breakfast special, and he is right on both counts.

In return for keeping his new best buddy on the straight and narrow, Tobias gets a chance to spill his guts all over the coffee-stained linoleum table about whatever might be on his mind, be it shit-eating Nazis or his marital troubles.

Not that Chris doesn't talk. Chris has a story too. Chris has many stories. Chris is full to bursting with anecdotes and episodes taken from his life and from the lives of others—shady characters who seem culled from the pages of pulpy crime novels, like femme fatales who trip all over their stilettos to get to his dick and about a dozen different men whose names end with “the Enforcer.” Chris's stories are rarely true, never believable, and always exceptionally vulgar. 

Every once in a while, however, a sliver of something like sincerity slips past the cloak of machismo, striking quickly and then retracting, like a switchblade, keeping Tobias on his toes. 

“You think you had it rough?” he said to Tobias that first night at the bar, briefly halting the seemingly unstoppable torrent of grievances that had been pouring steadily out of Tobias's mouth. Tobias, in the middle of telling a story in which he was publicly forced to shine a Nazi's dirty boots with his tongue, is fairly certain he _did_ have it rough and was about to say as much, but Chris continued: “I'm not saying that you didn't,” he backtracked, “but try going through all that same shit at the tender age of seventeen and see how your life turns out then. I guaran-fucking- _tee_ you ain't becoming no lawyer.”

“She'll never understand you,” he said when Tobias brought up Genevieve. “Believe me, I've been through this three—no four, four times. And you don't really want her to either. You just gotta hope the sex stays good, 'cause that's all you two have in common now.”

Now Tobias mops up the last of his egg yolks with a soggy piece of brown toast as he listens to Chris reveal the reason for his most recent relapse. It seems his wife—no, his ex-wife, _ex_ , E-X—Bonnie, you know, the one with the (here he gestures obscenely and Tobias smiles apologetically at their waitress as she passes by): well, she's getting remarried. To someone else, this time. Even invited him to her wedding. Bitch. Tobias looks up at Chris over the remains of his breakfast and is surprised to see redness and maybe even the hint of tears welling up in his eyes. “Doesn't matter,” he says. “We both know she's better off without me, don't we, Toby?” 

Tobias shakes his head but he can't bring himself to actually say the word “no” out loud. They've been so honest with each other so far. 

He picks up his knife and fork again and starts stabbing at an unappetizing slice of tomato just to keep his hands from reaching out and covering Chris's, lying flat on the table and trembling just slightly.

*

A light is on in the house. Tobias sees it from the back seat of the cab as it turns the corner onto his street. He assumes, at first, that the light is just the reflection of the cab's headlights off the bedroom window; but no, that rectangle of light is still glowing softly after he watches the taillights disappear over the horizon.

Tobias stands at the foot of the driveway, wondering why anyone would be up at this time of night, calmly visualizing every worst possible scenario one by one, in order of increasing severity: Genevieve is waiting up to tell him that she's leaving him and taking the kids; Genevieve is waiting up to tell him that Aryan kidnappers have taken the kids; Aryans are inside waiting for him, having already murdered his wife and children, and he is walking right into their waiting hands right now. Having finished this exercise, and having nowhere else to go, he walks to the door and opens it gently, muffling every sound but the sharp _click_ of the lock snapping shut once he's inside. He removes his shoes and pads softly down the hall in his socks. 

Genevieve is waiting up for him, but she has nothing to tell him. She sits in bed with a sheet wrapped around her body. Her shoulders are bare and her little red-painted toes poke out from the sheet near the foot of the bed. Tobias grabs the tiny pinkie of her left foot between his thumb and index finger before reaching underneath the sheet and tickling the bottom of her foot. She laughs and he feels immensely satisfied. She playfully kicks his hand away, and he grabs her ankle, lifting it up and to the side to make room for himself between her legs as he crawls into bed. He pulls off the sheet with the flourish of a stage magician, revealing a nude body that is thinner than he remembers but beautiful nonetheless.

“I missed you,” Tobias says, between a kiss on Genevieve's earlobe and a kiss on her collarbone. Genevieve just shoots him a mischievous smile and tugs gently at the hem of his shirt. Tobias returns the look, and then jumps out of the bed and strips naked in front of her, heedless of the light that neither of them have bothered to turn off. Behind him the useless gauzy curtain flutters in the breeze in front of the open window. Tobias turns his back to Genevieve to shut the window and secure the curtain; the light, however, he leaves on. 

When Tobias turns back around Genevieve is still there on the bed, her eyes and arms still open to him, still wearing an easy smile and nothing else. Seeing her like that feels like suddenly remembering something important that he can't believe he forgot; he is briefly overwhelmed with the realization of how much and how long he has missed her, as if he is experiencing all those months of separation at once. 

Tobias lets the regret and the longing pass through him. What else can he do? 

The only answer is to climb into the bed, joining Genevieve where she has been waiting for him, patiently, all this time.

*

Tobias thinks that he is watching Genevieve sleep; she rolls over and opens her eyes, proving him wrong. 

“This was a good night, wasn't it?” she says.

“No,” Tobias says. “This was a _great_ night, actually.”

Genevieve smiles and shuts her eyes. Tobias listens to her breath as it steadies and slows down until he is fairly certain that, yes, this time, she is truly asleep; he listens a little longer after that, letting the sound comfort him. 

Tobias expects no dreams tonight; and so it is with disappointment that he finds himself behind the wheel again, yet another new face on his windshield: Genevieve, her eyes closed as though she had just laid down there and fallen asleep.

*

“Today is the day. The big fucking day. Didn't I tell you? I thought I told you. I thought you knew. Well, in that case, I'm sorry for springing all this shit on you.

“I just needed you here right now. Fuck, I just needed somebody, _anybody_. Bonnie gets somebody, doesn't she? Bonnie is out there getting somebody right now and for the rest of her fucking life—that was supposed to be me, Toby. How could I give that up? 

“You know what, though? Good for her. I mean that Toby. You don't believe me? I'm gonna call her right now and offer her my congratulations. Gimme your phone, Toby. Hey, I'll pay you back for the long distance charges, just let me have your fucking phone for one fucking second.

“Fine. Fine. You keep it. You know what? Fuck you. Hey, you got yours, right?

“Hey, Toby, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Don't leave. Hey! Sit your ass back down on that stool; you know I'm just fucking with you. Here: let me buy you a drink and make it up to you—no? Right, right, stupid fucking idea. 

“Seriously, though: I'm happy for you, man. I'm happy for you. Why the fuck are you with me in this little shithole when you could be at home with her? Because I asked you to come? Fuck me. Who gives a shit about me? I'm your cautionary tale, my friend. _You_ want to be pounding back shots of cheap whiskey in a dingy little hole-in-the-wall—hey, no offence buddy—while the love of _your_ life pledges herself to sucking some other motherfucker's dick and spitting out his goddamn kids until death do us fucking part? So get out of here. Go on: get the fuck out. 

“Wait, wait: there's something I want to tell you. You gotta hold on to Jennifer—Genevieve, you gotta hold on to her, Okay? I'm serious, Toby, promise me you'll—promise me—”

*

Tobias hoists Chris's arm over his shoulder and manoeuvres him through the Waterfront's front door with seconds to spare before a noxious concoction of whiskey, beer and masticated cocktail peanuts foists itself violently out of Chris's gullet and splatters on the sidewalk like a water balloon full of rancid soup. Chris helps himself to the bottle of mineral water that Tobias had been nursing all night, rinsing his mouth and then returning it. Tobias accepts it automatically and moves to take a swig himself, before thinking better of it and tossing the bottle into a nearby trashcan.

Out in the fresh air Chris's spine straightens, his enunciation improves and his weight shifts from Tobias's shoulders to his own two feet; the arm, however, remains where it is, transforming imperceptibly from a gesture of necessity to one of affection. Tobias remembers what he would do if he was _elsewhere_ : shrug it off or slap it away, crack a joke or hurl an insult, depending on just whose shoulder the arm was attached to; but out in the fresh air his instincts have dulled and he just leans into it, letting his body turn toward Chris until they're fully embracing each other.

“Thank you,” Chris says. Tobias can feel his hair fluttering in Chris's breath; the skin on his neck feels warm. Chris squeezes him tighter. “Thank you.” One of Chris's hands slides up Tobias's back, the tips of his fingers brushing through the hair on the nape of Tobias's neck.

“No problem, man,” Tobias says, patting Chris on the back. “Anyone from group would have done the same thing.” 

Chris pulls back and places his hands on either side of Tobias's face. His expression holds the mix of benign condescension and scepticism that Tobias generally reserves for conversations with his children. “Right,” he says, letting his hands drop. He turns away from Tobias, marching confidently along the cab-lined street, staggering drunkenness and crippling despair apparently having been sloughed off into the sewer along with the contents of his stomach. 

“Didn't I tell you to go home to your wife?” he shouts without looking back. 

*

Tobias does go home to his wife. He expects to find her asleep in their bed, but she isn't there. He checks the kids' rooms, the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom: nothing. He even calls his parents, where the kids are staying that night—Tobias had anticipated a romantic evening until Chris called with his request for an emergency intervention ( _and Genevieve had gladly given him permission: “go on, go help him, you can't just stand by while someone destroys himself”_ )—and gets two digits in to dialling the police to report a missing person before thinking to check the garage.

There she is, behind the windshield: her eyes closed, like she's sleeping. How long has she been there? The car is no longer running, the gas has run out: but the _smell_. How did he not notice the smell? 

He dials the remaining digits:

“I'm calling to report a murder,” he says.

*

Here's Genevieve's story—the end of it, at least—and in her own words, at that; written down in her own hand on a page of expensive stationary that the police find sitting atop the antique vanity table in her bedroom:

_Toby,_

_I'm sorry. I can't do this anymore. I ~~thought that I~~ was sure that I could, but I can't._

_I should just pack up my bags and leave, but I'm a coward. I can't go through that again. My friends and family wouldn't look me in the eye when I stood by you after you killed that little girl, and your friends and family wouldn't speak to me after I filed for divorce, saying that I left you all alone in that awful place. I'm all alone without you, but I'm all alone with you too. I don't know what else to do. I feel as though I have no choice._

_Tell Holly and Gary and Harry that Mommy loves them. I think maybe they should stay with their grandparents for a while now. I think that would be a good idea._

_I hope you understand that I had to do this. I'm sorry. I had no choice. I'm sorry._

_Genevieve_

*

There's another story that Tobias reads between the lines of the one that Genevieve has written. There's something there, he believes, and it must be written in the secret, intimate language of married couples that only the spouse can understand; because why else would it be so fucking difficult for everyone else to get it through their heads?

“I don't know how it can be any more clear. It's as plain as day; as plain as the nose on my fucking face: _It's a message._ Why do you think that she wants the kids to stay with you? For their _safety_. She was thinking of them, right up until the very end. 

“Look: 'I had to do this.' And here: 'I had no choice.' And 'I'm sorry,' again and again. I mean, Jesus Christ, Dad, could it be anymore obvious? _She didn't want to do this_! 

“Things were good between us. _Great_ , actually. Yeah, they were rough for a while, okay? I won't lie. But we had just started to turn things around. Why now?

“I'll tell you why: she was coerced. And that's not my _theory_. I know she was, and I know who fucking did it, too. And all I'm saying is: the police better get to him before I do, because a face full of shit is _nothing_ compared to—

“Sorry. I'm sorry. You're right. They shouldn't see me like this. She's right. Take them. Take them away. 

“No, I'm not going to do anything stupid. I'm all they have left, right? 

“Now _please_ : get them the fuck out of here.”

*

And here's the story that the police tell to Tobias, over and over again, using different words each time:

“We see no sign of foul play.”

“There is no evidence at this time of the involvement of any white supremacist organizations in your wife's death.”

“There is no record of any Christopher Keller at the address you've provided, Mr. Beecher, and no evidence linking him to this case.”

“Mrs. Beecher's death has been ruled a suicide by the medical examiner.”

“We are no longer investigating Mrs. Beecher's death as a possible homicide.”

“Listen, the case is pretty cut and dry. You need to let this go.”

“Here, let me give you the card of a counsellor who specializes in bereavement.”

*

Chris has his own take on this, if you're willing to hear it. Tobias says that he isn't, but he's here, isn't he? Chris called and he came running, straight to that bar to which he has now thrice promised himself he would never return. 

But showing up is one thing—hearing Chris out, giving him the benefit of the fucking _doubt_? That's something else entirely.

See, Tobias isn't as stupid as certain decisions might suggest, and there are certain events that his life's most recent tragedy has inspired him to look at in a new light: like, say, the big, tattooed white guy joining his rehab group almost immediately after he does, and taking an intense interest in torturing him for no apparent reason; or, just as an example, that same big, tattooed white guy luring him away from his home on the same night that his wife died—was _killed_ —and then disappearing for a while because he needed to “figure out some stuff for himself,” as he said on the phone. 

But _that_ Chris, the one who called him just to apologize for not keeping in touch, who expresses nothing but shocked sympathy (“That's fucked up man, I'm sorry.”) at Tobias's news and appalled offence at his accusations (“You honestly think that I'd be capable of murdering a _woman_? Your _wife_?”), makes Tobias's old church-basement nemesis seem like a figment of his imagination and he finds himself _wanting_ , despite his instincts, to believe in Chris's innocence in Genevieve's death—almost as much as he wants to believe in his own. 

“How could I have even gotten there in time, Toby? We left together.”

“So you didn't do it yourself. Doesn't mean you weren't involved.” But Tobias is already losing conviction. As if to seal the deal, Chris offers up his personal theory:

“Listen, it's fucking obvious who's responsible here: that Aryan cocksucker you've been telling me about. Schillinger, right? Well, no wonder the cops won't listen to you: Nazis flock to law enforcement like flies to pigs—I'll bet half the force are Brotherhood or, at the very least, _highly_ sympathetic to the cause. So I'll tell you what we're gonna do, Toby.”

“What? What are _we_ going to do?”

“We're gonna take the fight to him.”

*

Vern Schillinger is still in Oz ( _you're welcome, outside world_ ) and thus as good as untouchable for an unconnected nobody in the world of convicted felons—which Tobias certainly is, and which Chris is at least claiming to be.

Vern Schillinger's wife is already dead and thus untouchable by all earthly forces. 

(“Not that I would sink as low as him,” Tobias clarifies after he reports this fact to Chris.

“You don't have to tell me that,” Chris says. “I know that you're the good guy here.”)

Vern's children are children and thus...well, now, are they? “Fifteen and sixteen,” Vern had said of his “good Aryan stock” and that must have been, what, two years ago? A year and a half, at least. And there's another part of that little chat that suddenly seems relevant: 

_“Maybe I should have them visit your family. Just a little friendly call, what do you think? My sons and your wife. My sons and your daughter.”_

“Maybe we should pay a visit to his family.” Tobias recites the words in unison with those being spoken in his mind. “Just a friendly little call,” he says. “What do you think? You, me, and the Schillinger boys.”

Chris has been nodding the whole time Tobias has been speaking, with an enthusiasm that is ever-increasing and a smile that is ever-widening, like skin slowly being split apart. “Fuck yes,” he says when Tobias is finished, like this is the greatest fucking idea he's ever heard in his life. That paper-cut smile bursts into a big, bloody axe-wound of a grin.

*

Of course, the plotting and planning of sweet and bloody vengeance is all well and good back in lock-up, where endless hours pass during which it is literally the only form of entertainment available. The real world, however, overflows with distractions and digressions. Between legal paperwork, funeral planning, and packing for the kids' extended vacation with Grandma and Grandpa, Tobias finds himself with very little time for serious consideration of the question: “What is to be done about the Schillinger boys?” and that conversation with Chris starts to seem more and more like nothing more than a guy blowing off steam with his buddy in a bar.

Nights are different. Nights are solitary and unbearably peaceful. Tobias's days have made progress and begun the slow process of healing, but his stubborn nights have refused to move on. At night he may as well be lying on his bunk in his cell or on the hard floor of the hole, his thoughts as consumed as ever by hatred—for himself, of course, and, guiltily, for Genevieve, but most of all for Schillinger. Tobias lies awake at night concocting and then discarding various revenge schemes, trying to top his own triumphant coup d’état on the eve of poor old Vern's parole hearing. This is only an exercise, he thinks, as each scenario he envisions builds on the previous one's brutality until he is picturing the entire Schillinger family—including even Vern's dead wife, resurrected somehow in these fantasies, though only briefly—performing in a spectacularly gruesome Grand Guignol that Tobias himself is directing, with Vern as helpless audience. During the day he will remember these thoughts and feel disturbed and ashamed, but for now they are the only thing staving off sleep and the dreams that accompany it: broken bodies landing on his windshield like raindrops, Kathy Rockwell turning to Genevieve turning to Holly turning to himself, Genevieve at the wheel now, not drunk but asleep. Emergency vehicles can already be heard in the distance, their sirens getting louder, coming for him. His dream self blinks his dream eyelids and Genevieve is replaced by Schillinger, who smiles as he suddenly accelerates the car, jolting Tobias awake. 

A phone is ringing on the nightstand beside him. He picks it up.

“If you're still up for it,” says a low voice his hazy mind doesn't immediately place, “I might have a lead on the former nesting grounds of a certain old friend of yours. And something tells me daddy's little boys ain't the type to venture too far from home, you know what I mean?”

Tobias takes a moment to process this information as his phone waits in patient silence. “Chris?” he finally says. “It's one o'clock in the morning.” 

“Exactly: I only got an hour before last call. So why don't you get your ass down here already?”

Tobias is perfectly cognisant of how much he'll regret accepting this invitation come daylight, but if the alternative is settling in for another night behind the wheel, crashing endlessly into ghosts, then he'll takes his chances and allow his worries to be assuaged by thoughts of how well-stocked his pantry is with coffee and aspirin. 

“I'll be there in ten minutes,” he says. 

Tobias grabs his house keys and wallet, and then thinks: a cab won't be able to make it all the way out here into the suburbs and then carry him all the way downtown in less than ten minutes. He grabs the keys to minivan, too, and heads to the garage—it's fairly unlikely he'll be stopped if he drives carefully enough, and really, what does he have to lose if he is? 

The only answer that surfaces in his still-murky thoughts is that he wouldn't make it to the bar in time to meet Chris. 

Well: better drive carefully, then.

*

Tobias walks into the Waterfront and wonders whether he's been abandoned: there's Chris's usual stool, four seats in from the left, but that's sure not Chris nursing a rum-and-coke and trying to negotiate her balance on that wobbly back leg that Chris is always bitching about; nor is he on the stool next to her, reeking of beer and desperation, making a obviously-doomed attempt to snatch a last-minute hook-up from the jaws of another lonely night. Tobias looks up and down the line-up several times, wondering if maybe Chris had decided to shave his head or get some decent clothes, but with no luck. He sits down anyway, on the unoccupied stool to the right of Miss Rum-and-Coke, and orders one of what she's having, sans rum. 

Rum-and-Coke notices him and smiles. “You're Toby, yeah?” she says. His look of surprise is apparently answer enough, as she gestures to a booth in the far, far back right corner of the bar: the one nobody likes to use because it's too fucking close to the men's room. “That guy told me to point you in his direction,” she says. Chris is there, waving him over. “Guess he thought you two needed some privacy tonight, huh?” She smirks.

Tobias ignores the comment and thanks her. “Hey,” she calls out as he walks away. “He said that you'd buy me a drink for telling you that. You know: like a tip?” 

Tobias hands the bartender a bill and tells him to top the lady off. Mr. Lonely over on the lady's left shoots him a dirty look, but becomes intensely occupied with counting cocktail peanuts when Tobias returns it—good to know that his staredown skills are still sharp after all these months out of practice, though garden-variety dirtbags like this fucker are pretty low hanging fruit for an Oz expat to pat himself on the back for intimidating. 

Chris grabs Tobias's drink as soon as it's within reach. He takes a sip. “Good boy,” he says. 

“Thanks,” Tobias says uncertainly. He starts to sit down opposite Chris at the table, but Chris pats the padded bench beside him. Tobias sees the wisdom in that—this won't be a conversation he wants eavesdroppers privy to—and he repositions himself to sit closer.

“I mean that,” Chris says. He reaches over and pats Tobias on the back a couple of times; upon completing the gesture, his hand remains resting between Tobias's shoulder blades. “This is a difficult time for you,” he says. His hand maintains a light but constant pressure. “Anybody else in your position? Would have just jumped right off the wagon and into the bottom of a shot glass within seconds of opening that garage door, no second thoughts. Hell, it's what I did.” Chris raises his own drink, the same colour as Tobias's but wafting out a scent suggesting fermentation and oak barrels alongside the sugar. “And with a shitload less justification, that's for sure.” He takes an unjustified swig and continues: “And you know what? Who would have held it against you if you did? What kind of asshole would have stood in judgement against you, shit you've been through? You get time off from work, right? You deserve a little time off from the hard work of sobriety, my friend.” 

“Be that as it may,” Tobias says, and he holds up his Coke before taking a sip. He crunches on a small, half-melted piece of ice, hoping it will help dam the flow of sweat that's broken out all over his skin. He hopes that Chris can't feel it seeping through his shirt. If he can he doesn't seem to mind, as his hand remains pressed firmly as ever against Tobias's upper back, fingertips digging ever so lightly between the ridges of his spine; he uses that hand to partially leverage himself as he stands up, pushing Tobias forward before forcing him to scoot back as he slides between Tobias and the table to escape the booth. His lower body brushes against Tobias as he does so, but he doesn't apologize.

“All I gotta say is,” Chris interrupts himself by taking another sip of his drink, “you're a stronger man than me.” He pats Tobias's back again before removing his hand completely. Tobias feels suddenly cold. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta piss. Watch this, would you?” He leaves his drink on the table. 

When Chris is out of eyesight Tobias gets up and walks toward the bar. He would keep going out the door if he didn't think that Chris would get pissed at him for leaving his drink completely unattended. So he walks to the bar just for somewhere to walk, somewhere that isn't the front door or the men's room, just to keep Chris's drink out of arm's reach. He doesn't trust himself with it right now. He doesn't trust himself very much at all right now.

The woman who pointed him in Chris's direction earlier is still at the bar. Tobias orders an ice water and, on impulse, decides to send a drink the lady's way as well. She smiles at him. “What'd I do to deserve this one?” she asks.

Tobias shrugs. “Nothing yet,” he says, regretting it immediately. She laughs out loud.

“Sorry to burst your bubble,” she says. “But I was just about to ask you if your, you know, _friend_ is available.” 

“How should I know?” Tobias says, but he heard the tentative question in the way she said 'friend'. “Actually,” he says, “I don't think he is. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's taken.”

“Okay,” the woman says. Her open body language has disappeared and she seems almost afraid of him.

“Sorry,” Tobias says. “I was just joking earlier. About the drink. I didn't want anything.” He means to sound reassuring but it comes out spiteful. “Expect anything, I mean,” he adds, awkwardly.

“Okay,” she says again, like it's the only word he deserves now. _Well, fuck you too._

Tobias returns to the booth just as Chris is sitting down. “Struck out?” Chris says, nodding at the woman walking out the door. Tobias shrugs. “Don't push yourself too hard,” Chris says. “We got more important shit to worry about, right?”

Tobias nods and takes a sip of the Coke sitting in front of him on the table. It burns going down. “Shit!” He slams the drink back down on the table; but it's too late now, right? 

“Oh, fuck, sorry,” Chris says, and “hey, one sip doesn't really matter, right?”

“If one sip doesn't matter,” Tobias says, “then—” he takes another sip, “—two shouldn't either, right? I mean, logically speaking.” He downs the rest of the glass, deciding that, given that he's already taken the plunge, he might as well make this break from sobriety _worth it_ before he has to start counting the days from zero all over again. “Sorry,” he says to Chris. “But you did say that I deserve it.” 

“Hey, no problem. I'll grab us two more, yeah?”

“Actually, I thinking maybe we should get something good this time.” Tobias goes to the bar and returns with two vodka martinis, dry, one olive each. 

“I like the way you think, Toby.”

*

Behind the wheel again. Is this a dream? It feels like a dream. His arms and legs arm numb. Should he pinch himself? He probably shouldn't. He should probably keep his hands where they are.

“Relax,” Chris says. “Ain't any little tykes out riding bikes at three A.M.”

“Shouldn't you be outside?”

“It's dark outside,” Chris says. “Dangerous to be outside in the dark, wouldn't you say? Nobody can see you.”

Yes, it is dark. That's unusual. Night hasn't fallen in his dreams in years. He blinks: yes, his eyes are open. Yes, it is dark.

“Besides,” Chris says. “I like it better in here with you.” He puts his hand on Tobias's knee. Tobias looks down at the hand. The way it moves up and down his thigh mesmerizes him. Chris lifts it up, grabbing Tobias gently by the chin. Tobias starts to close his eyes and lean toward Chris. Finally, finally. His face is turned, with gentle force, up and to the left. “Eyes on the road, Toby.”

“Yes, sir,” Tobias says. He laughs. Chris puts his hand back on Tobias's leg. Back and forth, he rubs the feeling back into Tobias's thigh until it starts to tingle. Each time Chris's hand slides up from the knee it goes a little higher. The change is almost imperceptible from one cycle to the next, but after two or three times it becomes a discernible pattern; after four, blatantly obvious; and after five—

“Eyes on the road, Toby.”

After five, he wakes up.

*

Tobias is lying on a stained and threadbare couch in a small and sparsely decorated living room. The only other pieces of furniture he sees are a chipped coffee table nearly collapsing under the weight of a dozen empty beer bottles and a rabbit-eared television at least ten years out-of-date. There's a window above him through which the sun obstinately insists on shining, despite the existence of actual sky being only theoretical from this vantage, a crumbling brick wall representing the entire visible outside world. The smell of the place is stale and boozy and no sooner is he noticing it than he's making a beeline for the toilet in the closet-sized bathroom just a few feet away and emptying the mostly-liquid contents of his stomach. He doesn't remember much of what he did last night, but he can guess from the nearly-whole olive staring up at him from the toilet bowl like a floating eye that it was ill-advised at best.

Tobias rinses his mouth out with some Listerine he finds in an otherwise empty cupboard under the sink, pisses with the door open for a full two minutes, and shuffles back to the couch. _Jesus Christ_ , his head is fucking _pounding_. He searches among the empties on the table until he finds a few bottles with about an inch of liquid each, plugs his nose, and downs them like shots. The pain lessens slightly. He goes to the tiny kitchenette and rummages through the cupboards until he gives up hope of finding a clean glass and drinks water straight from the tap until his stomach starts to hurt.

Finally feeling up to facing another human being, Tobias knocks on the bedroom door. He receives no answer. He calls out: “Chris?” At least, he assumes that's whose place this is. “You awake?” Still no answer. The door is slightly ajar. He pushes it the rest of the way open. Tobias sees Chris curled up on a mattress on the floor, but when he reaches for him he realizes that he's trying to wake up a heap of blankets. 

At least his wallet is still in his pocket. He reaches for it: everything accounted for. His house keys, too. Wait: two sets? 

“Fuck.” He remembers it now: grabbing Genevieve's keys on the way to the bar. Well, his meter sure as fuck must have run out by now. He just hopes that his cab can get there before he gets ticketed. 

Tobias grabs his phone and starts dialling—but how is the cabbie supposed to know where to pick him up? There's another window in the bedroom. Tobias pushes open the curtains to see if he can get a handle on where the fuck he is. He sees it right away, parked on the side of the road in a sweet spot right in front of the building, looking so out of place in this part of town: the good old Beecher family minivan.

*

The first thing Tobias does after he pulls into his driveway is pop the trunk and unload the assemblage of paper bags contained therein, their contents clinking and jingling as he deposits them on their temporary home of his front porch. His neighbour's door opens, almost causing him to drop a particularly heavy collection of glass bottles. _Shit, shit, shit_. “Planning a party?” says the man. Tobias doesn't know what this man—who moved in while Tobias was on his little vacation and has yet to introduce himself—knows about him, but to his ears the man's tone sounds more suspicious than friendly or curious.

“A memorial service,” Tobias says, hoping to shut the guy up. It seems to work. The guy's expression softens and he looks down at his feet. 

“About that,” the man says. _Here we go,_ Tobias thinks. _Repeat after me:_

_I just wanted to say._

“I just wanted to say.” 

_I'm sorry for your loss._

“I'm sorry for your loss.”

_And if there's anything I can do._

“And if there's anything at all I can do.”

_Don't hesitate to ask._

But the man leaves that sentence dangling and throws a curveball: “Genevieve was a wonderful person.” 

What the fuck? Tobias doesn't know who the fuck this guy is but the guy knows his dead wife's name _and_ what kind of person she was? He has a momentarily feeling a déjà vu and remembers his first day in Oz, Bob Rebadow telling him that Genevieve was divorcing him: he still can't figure that one out. He misses Rebadow.

“What would you know about it?” Tobias says to the man, who flinches a little in surprise and anger, then relaxes and shakes his head. 

“Like I said,” the man says. “If you need anything.” He grabs his newspaper and returns to his home.

Tobias admires the man's restraint, taking the high road and ignoring all these obvious yet cutting retorts just hanging in the air between them: “What would _you_ know about it?” for example. “More than you, I'll bet,” would have worked just fine. Likely this person was retrieving his paper while Genevieve drove the kids to school, mowed the lawn, put out the garbage, maintained the garden, carried in the groceries—et cetera, et cetera, all by herself, while he was in prison; fuck, let's be honest, while he was out drinking. 

_I'm all alone without you, but I'm all alone with you too._

Tobias regrets his harshness with the man but he's relieved to be left alone for his present task. He pulls the van safely into the garage and searches the street for a storm drain. Upon finding one, he discreetly drops the Genevieve's keys and nudges them with his foot. They slip through the grate and, with a _splash_ and a _clink_ , they land in the bottom of the drain. 

Tobias feels no apprehension about his decision. He has nowhere to go. He has no one to see. On his front porch sits everything he needs to carry him through the night.

*

_“Hi! This is Genevieve Beecher. Neither I nor my husband can answer the phone at the moment, but leave a message and we'll be sure to get back to you. Thanks for calling! Bye now!”_

_Beeeep._

_“Toby? Are you there? Toby? All right, I guess I'll get you back later.”_

_“Hey, Toby, Where the fuck are you? Something come up? I'm here, but there's no sign of you. I got the right time? You forget or something? We talked about this last week: The Waterfront, Tuesday at seven.”_

_“Toby, come on: get the fuck over here.”_

_“Toby, I wish you would re-record that message. Your mother and I are afraid to let the children call you; they're already having trouble understanding why they can't talk to their mother, it would confuse and upset them. Frankly, it's starting to upset us a little bit. Anyway: give us a call as soon as possible. I know you need your time, but we're starting to worry. What's that? Oh, all right. Here you go—_

_“Hi daddy! I love you! I miss you! Okay, bye.”_

_“Toby, man, fuck you, I'm coming over. I got some shit I gotta tell you that just can't wait for you to get off your ass. I took a trip up north this morning, you know, along the yellow brick road, and I talked to the guy you told me about. Look, you know I can't say fuck-all over the phone, but we're in business baby, you know what I mean?”_

*

Lock the doors. Cover the windows. Never answer the phone. Unplug the phone. No, wait: leave it. It's an excuse to hear her voice again. It's more special when you're not expecting it: at first, you dread the ringing too much to enjoy it; but once you learn to tune that noise out, the voice that follows it will drift into your ears from two rooms away, through the walls, through the sound of the television or of running water, through the haze of your drunken stupor, muffled just enough that you can recognize the voice but not the words and it feels like she's still there in the house, just chatting on the phone, talking to the kids, shouting something to you that you'll have to call her into the room to repeat. 

Tobias has yet to get the hang of being alone in a house. Only recently had being alone in a room stopped feeling a little luxurious to him.

The Beecher house is not an uncomfortable place to be alone in. Upon discovering that Genevieve was pregnant with their third child, Tobias and Genevieve put a down payment on it before anything more than the foundation had been built based solely on the quality and close proximity of the neighbourhood's schools; they moved in a month before Harry was born. As such, the house is new enough to contain neither a single creaky floorboard nor drafty window. This house is too young to be haunted already. 

Then again, the same could be said of Emerald City. 

Tobias often forgets about the days in Emerald City, forgets that it wasn't just the nights that drove him mad. The days subjected him to a different kind of torture than the nights and his difficulty remembering them points favourably toward the efficacy of their methods. During the day, time in Emerald City worked differently than it does in the real world—like it was sucking up all of the outside world's wasted time along with its wasted lives, and had no better idea of what to do with the former than with the latter. Time was sluggish and flightless and everyone within that vortex was engaged constantly in the back-breaking labour of removing it from around their necks and finding somewhere to stash it until it inevitably escapes, crawls back on, and resumes crushing their bones under its weight.

Maybe a little bit of that Em City magic was built into the frame of the Beecher house; or maybe Tobias just brought some back with him, like an infection that had, until now, been sitting dormant in his cells. Perhaps the slothful beast never forgot about him, and has been slinking along the highway this whole time, finally arriving at the front door precisely as a vacancy opened up in the house. Most likely, that distortion that thickens time into something with mass is the inevitable outcome of a life lived behind walls. And so Tobias wanders from room to room, looking for ways to shake off the few stubborn hours that still cling to him each time he surfaces from another attempt to drown them in alcohol.

Take a deep breath. Plug your nose. Dive in. Each time you come up for air the day will be a little bit shorter. Each time you'll emerge in a different room. You'll feel like a spirit diving in and out of the ether, barely anchored to this mortal plane, flickering like the static you see on the television screen when you wake up on the couch. What were you watching? Some cop show, wasn't it? Did you want them to catch the bad guy, or were you hoping that he'd get away?

Close your eyes. Now open them: faces all around you. Where did these photographs come from? Didn't you rip them up? How did they get here in the hole with you? The floor is soft underneath you. You're in a closet. The photographs are tumbling out of a box that Genevieve had always meant to get around to sorting through. Take a drink for each picture that you're not in and close your eyes again.

Open your eyes. You're in the front seat. Dreaming again? You'd hoped to avoid this. But it's different this time—the car is stationary; in fact, the engine isn't even running. In fact, look around you: seem a little spacious? You're in a different vehicle altogether. Pinch yourself: hurts, right? Guess you're awake. You're awake and you're crying, pounding on the steering wheel in frustration because you just remembered what you did with the keys. Where did you think you were going in your condition, anyway? And with the garage door closed? Just forget about it. Just close your eyes.

Wake up in bed. Hear a voice drifting in from the other room. Sounds like Genevieve first; then it sounds like Chris. Sounds like you're still dreaming, either way, hearing what you want to hear. Now why the fuck would you want to hear Chris's voice? You tell me. 

Close your eyes. Who do you see?

Open your eyes. “Chris?” 

Chris is standing in the bedroom doorway, leaning his left shoulder on the frame, the fingers of his right hand wrapped loosely around the neck of a beer bottle, looking exactly the picture of relaxed nonchalance. “You been dodging my calls, Toby?”

Tobias rubs the palms of his hands over his eyes until he feels sufficiently assured that he is, in fact, awake. (And that, Jesus fuck, could he ever use a shave.) Chris is still there when he finishes, taking a swig of his beer.

“How long have you been there?” Tobias's voice sounds about as rough and scratchy to his ears as his face felt to his hands.

“'Bout a minute or two,” Chris says, but the bottle in his hand is almost empty. “Been knocking at the door for going on an hour, though,” he says. “Been calling all night.”

“How did you get in?”

“Garage,” Chris says. “Thought you would've learned to lock your doors, Toby.”

Tobias grabs the edge of the mattress and uses it to heave himself into a sitting position; feeling reasonably certain that he's wearing pants, he throws the blankets off his legs, stands up, and waits for the world to stop spinning. Chris watches him wobble from the doorway; too late to be any help, he takes a step forward and offers his arm for balance. Tobias snatches the bottle from his hand and drains it, placing it with some other empties on a table in the hall on his way to the bathroom. He doesn't even remember cracking into the beer yet. 

“Why are you even here?” he asks, but hearing the answer drops quickly from the top of his list of priorities, replaced by a pressing need to take a piss—might as well clean the fuck up too, while he's at it. He shuts himself in the bathroom and hopes that Chris is at least happy to hear his advice being taken seriously as the lock clicks shut.

*

So. Now that everyone is presentable: Why is Chris here?

“I talked to that guy you told me about—you know, silver-tongued motherfucker with a hand in every felonious pot, contacts from every niche of the criminal underworld coming out his ass? Said he owed you for watching his back during some big fucking riot? Yeah, Ryan O'Reily, that's it. Gave the guards some line about being his cousin and they fucking bought it wholesale, can you believe that shit? Feisty little bitch came out swinging with this hardass “This lying cocksucker is _not_ my fucking cousin” bullshit 'til I drop _your_ name and it's all “Sorry, _cuz_ , haven't seen you in so long I barely recognized your face.” And then he starts waxing all nostalgic about you like you two were fuck-buddies or something. You got some reputation, you know that?

“So in between talking you up this mick lets slip two things: 

“One: He has some extravagant fucking ideas about the kind of cash a former lawyer such as yourself has stashed away for a rainy day and, as much as he likes you, he ain't doing shit 'til you can smuggle him in a piece somehow.

“Two: Despite all the not-so-subtle hints dropped that he's in it for the money and nothing but, the guy can't hide that he hates Schillinger's guts. Anything you do to piss that Nazi fuck off is gonna get you one hell of a discount. 

“So I just need the okay from you, Toby, and he can get us hooked up with such a massive fucking shitload of product on the cheap that a couple of dumbass junkie kids from the sticks would blow the entire state prison population twice just to get their hands on it. 

“You in, Toby?”

*

Tobias is _not_ in. He's not entirely sure what being _in_ entails, remembering as he does only vague snatches of the conversation to which Chris is referring—some grandiose bullshit about going to war with the Schillinger clan, the drunken bravado with which he claimed Ryan O'Reily as some kind of brother in arms—but if it means spending more time with Chris, then he's going to have to sit this one out. Hazy as the night before may be, the morning after—the run-down apartment and the vomit and the sight of the van sitting on the curb, two solid tonnes of definitive evidence against his claim to be fit for society—is quite clear in his memory; as is the dream from which he woke to it: Chris's hand on him, scaring him more than the endless replays of Kathy Rockwell's death that have nearly become a comforting routine to him at this point. Chris has never been to Oz, but being around him triggers Tobias's memories of the place in a visceral way that the usual suspects of locked doors and small spaces never do—memories of riots and smashed glass and sneaking drugs with O'Reily behind Schillinger's back. Chris makes him associate Oz with freedom and look back on it with nostalgia. Chris turns up into down and turns Tobias into someone he's not.

Tobias can't very well tell Chris any of this, so he gives him a line about his needing to be there for his kids—true enough on its own but obvious bullshit as an excuse. If Chris wanted to be decent he would play along, he wouldn't push, he would assure Tobias that he's making the right decision—that his kids are paramount and that just being there is the most important thing and that he's a good guy who has his priorities in order—but Chris, as Tobias well knows, is anything but decent. 

“But this is for _them_ ,” he says.

“You are avenging _their_ mother,” he says.

“You think he's not gonna go for them next?” he says.

What he's really saying is: “Can't back out now.” What he's really saying is: “My ass is on the line here.” So Tobias responds to that:

“I'm not afraid of O'Reily. He can have his money; I don't give a fuck about money. Just get out of my life.” 

“O'Reily said something else,” Chris continues as though Tobias hadn't said a word. “Something that we both already knew, but this is from the horse's mouth, Toby, you won't have no more hang-ups after you hear this:

“See, this Schillinger fucker's been shooting his mouth off up and down Oswald Pen's hallowed halls, telling anybody who'll listen how he got you back and then some and then some fucking more for fucking up his parole. Says he let his boys do the dirty work themselves, seeing as it was them you were hurting more than their old man by keeping daddy from teaching his boys a much-needed lesson about restraint. Says he finally lured them away from the junk by giving them a different outlet for their teenage excesses, you know what I mean? 

“O'Reily tells me rumours been spreading about the little shits gang-banging her and shit, that she invited them into the house and sucked them off willingly because a woman's got to find satisfaction somewhere and that sure ain't—not my words, Toby, not my words—that sure ain't gonna be with some pussy little prag. Your boy O'Reily says he don't believe a word, but the rest of the prison population ain't exactly maintaining a healthy sense of skepticism about the situation—you know how it is: those bored motherfuckers circulate gossip like cigarettes.

“I know you don't want to hear this, Toby. I'm not telling you this to hurt you. I'm telling you this so that you understand that this shit isn't theoretical anymore. You were right: Schillinger killed your wife. He's fucking bragging about it. And now you're telling me we're just gonna let him get away with it?”

“Why do you care so much?” Tobias says. “Why do you care at all?”

Chris pours himself a shot from a bottle of whiskey that he must have stolen from the pantry while Tobias was in the shower. He downs it and pours another, handing it to Tobias. Tobias drinks it, warily. “Well?”

Chris shakes his head. He hands Tobias the bottle. “Maybe you'll find the courage in there to answer that question yourself.” 

*

Chris drove to Tobias's house on his new bike and he'll be damned if he's taking a cab home and leaving that baby this far out of his sight for the whole fucking night after the shit that he went through to get it. (Tobias does not inquire.) No fucking way. Not gonna happen.

So Chris crashes at the Beecher house, at Tobias's reluctant yet adamant insistence. Tobias gives him the master bedroom, finding the idea of Chris using either of the children's beds somehow unseemly, and folds his body up neatly until it fits into Gary's silly little race car shaped twin-bed. He drifts in and out of sleep in the soft light cast from a nightlight shaped like a spaceship that, if he recalls correctly, is supposed to chase bad dreams and blow them up with its lasers. ( _If it works_ , he thinks, _they could make a fortune marketing these things to ex-cons._ )

Tobias does dream, though, and it is bad. He is in his car again. He is driving. Here it comes—he closes his eyes: thunk and clatter and screech. Tobias opens his eyes. Staring at him from the windshield is—nobody. Nothing. Not even a crack. Just empty sky and open road, as far as the eye can see. He looks into the rearview mirror and sees something lying on the road, already small—just a speck, really, mistakable for a tiny smudge of dirt on the glass—and getting smaller, until it disappears behind the horizon for good.

Tobias looks into that mirror a long time before he realizes that he has no reflection. He tries to conjure up the other faces he has worn in these dreams—the bespectacled and respectable lawyer he was before Oz or the wild-eyed lunatic he was inside—but the mirror displays only the car's interior and the road behind him. 

Gripped by a sudden compulsion, Tobias jerks the steering wheel and the car veers off the road. The sun sets with unnatural speed and Tobias's headlights are both broken. Still, he powers on ahead, through obstacles he can't see, crushing them under his wheels with a terrible sound. Shadows gather in the mirror with every crash and crunch, the contours of a face—if he can keep driving until sunrise he'll be able to see it.

But the sun rises so fast that the light just flares off the mirror, blinding him. When he wakes it is still night and the bulb in Gary's lamp has burnt out. He fumbles around on the bedside table, knocking the bottle he'd taken to bed with him and spilling whiskey all over Gary's dinosaur-themed bedsheets. He manages to save it in time to salvage a few fingers worth and drinks them down. 

There are no mirrors in Gary's room, so Tobias heads to the bathroom. He needs to know how the dream ends. 

On his way he passes by the master bedroom. The door is open. Tobias can just see the shape of Chris is the darkness. A car passes by the house, its headlights briefly flooding the room; in that split-second of light Tobias realizes that he doesn't care how the dream ends. He remembers only the sudden compulsion he felt, to take a sudden turn off the road.

A bottle and a glass sit on the nightstand beside Chris. The room is too dark for Tobias to make out what they contain. He takes a sip from the glass: vodka. Tobias expected beer but he doesn't flinch; he welcomes the surprise and he drinks a little more. What did Chris need this for? To forget what he had said earlier, wash the taste of it out of his mouth? To gather his own courage and slink into Tobias's sleeping quarters, crawling on top of him in a bed as small as a prison cot? Maybe it had nothing to do with Tobias at all—maybe Chris was just biding his time until Tobias fell into that deep sleep only accessible to the drunk and the dead, allowing him to steal away to his bike and disappear forever into the night. Maybe that's the real reason he gave Tobias the bottle and Tobias has misunderstood everything.

Another car, another set of headlights, and another glimpse of Chris's face—no, there has been no misunderstanding here. 

“What took you so long?” Chris says.

“I was dreaming.”

“Of me?” 

“No.” 

Chris laughs. “Liar,” he says. “Get in here.” He pats the bed beside him. Tobias climbs in. What now? Tobias reaches over to the nightstand and turns on the lamp, hoping to gather clues from Chris's face. Chris gives him nothing; he has retreated to arm's length. Tobias grabs the glass and sips more vodka to buy himself some time. Chris takes it from his hand and drinks the rest. He reaches over Tobias's chest to return the glass to the table. He is careful not to brush fingers, not to brush bodies. “So,” he says. “Who _were_ you dreaming about?”

“I don't know yet.”

“That's two,” Chris says. “You better tell me something true next, or I might have to walk out on you.”

“I love you.” 

There is a sharp intake of breath, shallow and barely audible, held briefly and agonizingly, then released as a whisper: “I love you, Toby.”

And then they're kissing—Tobias has no fucking clue who started it, but they're kissing, and it's sloppy as fuck, with more tongue than two kids in a closet celebrating their first seven minutes in heaven and with teeth clinking like glasses. Tobias laughs out loud and Chris looks at him like he's starting to wonder what the hell he's gotten himself into. _As well he fucking should_. Chris's next kiss feels like an order to shut the fuck up and Tobias takes it gladly, fearful of all the songs bubbling up in his throat.

_Merry are the bells  
and merry would they ring._

Chris pushes Tobias onto his back and grabs him by the wrists. Those old Oz instincts, hard to suppress, flare up, and then there goes that glass on the nightstand, toppled over by a flailing limb and breaking into pieces on the floor with a loud

_SMASH!_

_Merry was myself  
and merry would I sing._

Glass, when it shatters, rings out a clarion that resonates at precisely the pitch of the song that Tobias's heart sings in certain company. It works on him like the snapping of a hypnotist's fingers. His mind is yanked out of his old prison cell and for a second he's floating in space, looking down on the world like a map: there's a little arrow saying 'You Are Here' floating far, far outside of the little square marked with an 'O' and a 'Z' where Schillinger still resides and rots and picks broken shards of the door to his cage out of his eye. When Tobias returns to his body he finds that Chris's hands are no longer touching it, but rather are facing him with open palms in a conciliatory gesture. 

Tobias takes each of Chris's wrists in his hands and—slowly, deliberately—slides those open palms under his shirt, up the bare skin of his chest. Chris lets his limbs be manipulated like a marionette's, watching with blank and inscrutable eyes as though _his_ mind is now taking its turn at a temporary leave of the here and now. Tobias tells him that he loves him again, and Chris's body wakes up with a clench of his fingers into Tobias's ribs. He takes back control of his hands and seizes the hem of Tobias's shirt, pulling it up and off. Tobias removes his shorts himself; he lies face down on the bed, baring his scars. He wishes he could ever get drunk enough to forget about them. He takes a deep breath: _I am here._

Tobias can feel the heat of Chris's hand hovering tentatively over his ass. Does he know he's being tested? Tobias is afraid to turn and see the disgust he imagines to be distorting Chris's face. “What are you waiting for?” he asks. “Permission?”

“Yes.” Chris's voice betrays no awareness that he's answering a rhetorical question. Maybe Tobias shouldn't have been so glib: the straightforward honesty and undisguised longing in that one word go straight to his dick, blunt his inhibitions far beyond the evening's endless drinking. _Yes._ That's it—that's what he needed to hear. _Yes._ He should make Chris wait, just a little bit, just to seem a little less eager—but he is, he is so fucking eager, and he wants to reward Chris's honesty in kind, and he _wants_ —

“Do it,” he says. “Please, just fucking touch me.”

Chris obliges to the letter of the request, touching Tobias's hair, his neck, his shoulders, running his fingers down Tobias's spine and raising a wave of goosebumps. He stops just short of Tobias's ass and pries his fingers under his hip and _fuck_. 

Finally, finally. Schillinger—Schillinger the lumbering and soulless best, voracious in his appetites; Schillinger the defeated old man, filthy and bleeding, crying out for a doctor, crying out for his sons; Schillinger the abstract concept, manifesting like the devil as acts of evil on Earth while he stays put down in Hell, pulling the strings—ceases to exist in Tobias's mind, even as Chris gropes his ass with his unoccupied hand, heedless of the brand; even as he straddles Tobias's thighs so that his ass can't help but press back against Chris's erection every time his body shudders. Nor is anything about Chris's hand on his dick reminiscent of Genevieve's dainty-yet-deft little fingers, and the aching nostalgia for her gentle touch that Tobias has being swimming in since she died evaporates alongside the ever-present fear of Schillinger's brutality. This is different. Of course: Chris is different. But he's not the only one.

Chris reaches for Tobias's chin, gently tilting his face up until they can see each other's eyes.

“We gonna do this?” he asks. 

“Yes.”

Chris collapses across Tobias's back and they kiss, awkwardly, with more contact between tongues than lips. Abruptly, Chris pulls back. His lips move to Tobias's ear. “Tell me,” he says. “What are we going to do?”

“You,” Tobias says, steady and confident, his hand groping toward the nightstand drawer, “are going to fuck me.”

“Yes,” Chris says, biting Tobias's earlobe. “Fuck yes I am.” 

Wait. Wait, wait, wait. “Wait.” Tobias reaches over and grabs the bottle from the nightstand, sending a few gulps of vodka burning down his throat, sending a pleasant tingling sensation throughout his body. He can hear Chris lubing up his cock behind him. “Use a lot,” he half-slurs into his pillow. He takes another sip and returns the bottle to the nightstand. 

“You ready?”

“Yes,” Tobias says. “Fuck yes I am.” He starts to laugh again. 

Chris still waits. His dick feels hard as steel against Tobias's ass, but he still waits. He strokes Tobias everywhere his hands can reach. “Toby,” he says. “I love you, okay?” 

“I love you,” Tobias says, as Chris pushes gently inside him. “Oh, _fuck_ , I love you, I love you.” Saying it makes it hurt less, reinforces the basic truth: _this is different._

Then Chris is inside him, fully. Chris is fucking him and it doesn't hurt much anymore, doesn't hurt much at all—it feels good, it feels really fucking good, it feels amazing. Fuck, it feels better than amazing: Tobias feels _free._ Free as a bird, free as the wind blows, unconstrained and alive and so completely _himself_ —just fucking _free._ Why did he ever think that freedom meant sunshine and family and working in a fucking office? He had all that before. And he was still a drunk. What's changed?

_I have. I've changed._

Tobias used to fear that his time in Oz had made a monster of him—that the place had chewed him up and when it spit him back out he would no longer be recognizable as himself. He had daydreamed that it might actually temper him, like fire, that he would lift himself up and come out stronger, wiser, _better_ and his friends would look upon him with the respect and admiration they usually reserved for their veteran fathers and grandfathers; but ultimately, when the time came, he had expected to shrug off all of his rage and madness like a coat on the prison's doorstep and step into his old life like a worn and comfortable pair of slippers. 

What never really occurred to him was that there were more than two worlds: inside and outside. More than who he was there and who he was here. He thought that he would have to choose: are you him or are you _him_? Are you good or bad, sane or insane, a Nazi's little prag or husband to a beautiful woman? The choice seemed obvious. 

Now the illusion has been broken: there are not two options, nor even three or four. There are not 'options.' There is not a fork in the road nor dozens of diverging pathways. There is a vast and unpaved expanse. And there is this, there is Chris, pushing harder now, breathing faster, and doing things to him that neither the lawyer nor the madman would have entertained the notion of under anything but the most extreme duress—the first deliberate decision he's made in the service of creating his new self. Does he feel it too? Just how aware is Chris of the feelings he inspires?

Tobias chances a glance over his shoulder; Chris doesn't seem aware of anything but his own dick. 

“Chris.” 

Chris freezes. His head jerks up and his hands clench. “What?” he says. He seems almost angry at being interrupted and Tobias finds himself suppressing a flinch and biting back an apology: “I'm sorry, sir. It won't happen again.” 

No. Fuck that shit: Tobias is _here_ , he is _free_ , and this is _different_. How different?

“Stop,” Tobias says.

“What the fuck did you just say?”

“I said pull your dick out of my ass and get the fuck off me.”

Chris complies. Is he reluctant? Fuck yes, that much is obvious, but he does as he's told nonetheless. After he pulls out he half-lies, half-sits with his back against the headboard, his still-hard dick in his hand, somehow managing to jerk off and sulk at the same time. “So. You want me to fuck off now, is that it?”

“Fuck, no.” Tobias spreads his legs and straddles Chris's lap, guiding Chris's dick back inside him and sinking down on it, painfully—he must be starting to sober up. Tobias takes a few more swigs of vodka to correct _that_ condition and the ache inside him becomes a bit more tolerable. 

Chris grabs the bottle from Tobias's hand and guzzles considerably more than his share, as though _he's_ the one taking a dick up his ass for the first time in a year. The bottle returns to nightstand empty.

Drops of vodka are scattered between beads of sweat across Chris's neck and chest, where they were spilled in Chris's haste to obtain the bottle. Tobias leans down and licks them one by one off of Chris's skin. He feels fingers stroking the nape of his neck and as he lifts his head he is kissed with a combination of hunger and tenderness as savoury as the familiar taste of alcohol and salt pooling together on his tongue.

Tobias pulls back enough to make eye contact as he starts to lift himself up and down on Chris's dick. From time to time Chris's eyes drift downward; each time, Tobias takes him gently by the chin and tilts his face back up until their eyes meet again. “Eyes on the road,” he says, the first time, and he laughs because he doesn't even know what the fuck he means, feeling the alcohol really start to take effect.

Faster, harder, keep your eyes on the road, even as they start to glaze over. Chris gives Tobias a shove to the shoulders and he falls backwards with his arms spread as if from a much greater height, as if into water. He lies there feeling like he's floating as Chris rises to his knees and whispers Tobias's name over and over again, increasing in volume, until at last, with a “ _fuck_ , yes,” he shouts it to the rafters. 

Chris pulls out, slides down Tobias's collapsed body, and takes his dick into his mouth. “Oh, god, Chris, fuck, _fuck_.” Tobias rambles on, his mouth repeating a certain set of words—“God,” “Fuck,” “Chris”—mechanically as the sensation of floating intensifies, bringing him closer and closer to that feeling of perfect freedom. As he comes he kicks his legs out like a man jumping for joy and the bottle crashes beautifully to the floor, drowning out any meaningless word he might be shouting with the song his heart sings.

_With a merry ding-dong happy, gay and free  
and a merry sing-song happy let us be!_

*

The windshield bursts inward, raining glass upon Tobias's face. Tonight's guest was not content to recline passively upon the windshield's surface, but rather preferred to dive headfirst, piercing it like a harpoon. Why? Well. Could be the weight of the body, at least twice and change that of your average eleven year old girl, maybe three or four times a waif like Kathy Rockwell. Could be the force with which he's hit. (That sudden acceleration from leisurely to breakneck, that dead fucking on accuracy, _slam_ , right smack dab in the middle of the fender? Yeah, you bet it was deliberate. No little pussy-ass “manslaughter” sentence here.) Could be just pure fucking malice. 

Is this fucker even dead? He must be. Shards of glass are sticking out of him like porcupine quills; Tobias could give his car a slick new paint job with all this blood. But—no, he's moving, he's fucking _moving_. He's clawing his at the air, straining like a mad dog on a leash. He's screaming something: gibberish? No, but something close to it: “Sieg heil, motherfucker! Sieg fucking heil!” He spits flecks of blood every time he speaks. 

Tobias turns on the radio to drown it out. The same song plays all across the dial: _“Hi! This is Genevieve Beecher. Neither I nor my husband can answer the phone at the moment, but leave a message and we'll be sure to get back to you. Thanks for calling! Bye now!”_

*

Glass crunches underneath Tobias's bare foot. The smallest, finest pieces encrust his sole like sand used to on those long walks on the beach that he and Genevieve hadn't taken since their honeymoon. The largest pieces slice into his skin. He waits, patiently, for the pain to travel his sluggish nervous system, and when it arrives he greets it with a hearty “Fuck!” Works just like a pinch: broken glass and blood, he _must_ be dreaming—but then there's that “ _Fuck!_ ” to prove that theory wrong. 

“Hello?” _Hello?_ Oh, right. _Right._ The phone, the _fucking_ phone—the very phone that Tobias had been ignoring for _days_ , only to leap right out of the deepest of sleeps and the sweetest of dreams (He doesn't remember much about it anymore, but he remembers Schillinger bleeding and what's sweeter than that?) in a mindless desperation to tear the receiver from its cradle on the very morning that his bed has been tricked out with deadly fucking booby-traps. 

Tobias hears a murmur and a click. “Wrong fucking number.” Thank fucking god: images of last night's activities are seeping into his mind like blood into a thick, plush, cream-coloured carpet and he retroactively justifies his attempted mad dash for the phone with the heroic motivation of sparing his conservative parents the shock of being greeted with another man's gravelly bedroom-voice. The insistent whine of a dial tone trilling faintly from the other room puts his fears at ease for now; his tensed muscles relax and the blood flows faster. He staunches it with a bunched up white t-shirt that he finds wedged between a couple of pillows.

“That my shirt you're ruining?”

Chris approaches the bed with a lazy saunter; Tobias thinks he sees—and he might be wrong, might just be hungover, barely awake, bereft of his glasses, and seeing what he wants to see—but he thinks he sees a tremor of protest rattling Chris's body against the restraints of a mechanical, practiced nonchalance, an urge to move faster than he's willing to allow. Tobias reaches out and strokes Chris's chest: yeah, there's a little shiver under his fingertips, but that might just be from the touch itself. “You look better without it,” he says.

Chris smiles. “Be that as it may,” he says, moving the hand away and staring for a minute at the faint traces of red fingerprints smeared on his chest. “Don't mean you ain't buying me a new one.” 

Chris manoeuvres Tobias's hand around his shoulders, lifts him slowly to his feet. “Can you walk?”

“Yeah, yeah, I can walk,” Tobias says, but the second that he tries to retrieve his arm his whole body lurches forward like a top that just stopped spinning. Chris catches him before he falls (“Yeah, like fuck you can walk.”) and takes his weight as he hobbles toward the bathroom. The makeshift bandage finishes unravelling in the bedroom doorway and every step down the hallway adds to a trail of bright red stains on the carpet that will dry to a dark brown crust before fading to a dirty-looking rust-coloured haze because there's no one left to give enough of a fuck to clean it up.

Look around: bottles, in varying degrees of emptiness, cover the surface of every coffee, dining and end table; some of them upright, others on their sides, their contents seeping into the wood and dripping on to the carpet, staining it brown in some instances and simply darkening it in others. There's a small hole in the wall between two framed family photographs that Tobias vaguely remembers creating with his fist, though he doesn't remember why. The home that he and Genevieve created together is descending into shambles. 

Tobias is crying by the time that he sits down on the lid of the toilet, the last of the previous night's manic confidence having vanished with a glimpse of his bleary red-eyed face and frail-looking nude body in the bathroom mirror. “I have fucked up my life,” he sobs, completely fucking mortified and completely unable to stop. “I have completely fucked up my life.” 

“No, you haven't.” Chris uses some fluffy white towels to soak up the excess blood and a damp white washcloth to wipe off the remaining film that clings to Tobias's skin. He dusts off the crumbs of crushed glass and takes a closer inspection: “It's not that bad,” he says. “This shit can be fixed, Toby. No fucking problem.” 

Tobias takes a look for himself. Blood continues to leak out from the straight pink line neatly bisecting his foot but it's trickling rather than gushing, teaspoons rather than buckets. He rubs his thumb back and forth along the length of it. “You're right,” he says. “Don't I look like a pussy?” 

“That's not what I'm talking about.” Chris has moved his hands to Tobias's thighs. “Schillinger fucked up your life, Toby.” His hands slide up and down. “Not you. _Schillinger_. Want to start cleaning this fucking mess up? Start with him. Start with fucking _him_ up.” 

Tobias nods, though he knows full well that there will be nothing left to salvage underneath the mess when he cleans it up—such an attempt would be like mopping the floor over a cracked foundation while the house slowly collapses around him. The only option left is to demolish the fucker and clear the space out to build something worthwhile; and, like it or not, Chris is the only person in Tobias's life who knows where to get dynamite.

All of this, however, is technical: Tobias could quibble with Chris over the nuances of the situation but you know what? Fuck the nuances because Chris is dead fucking right about one thing: 

“Tell me how to do it, then.” The sobbing has abated, leaving Tobias's voice harsh and weak. “Tell me how to we're going to fuck Schillinger. Make it good. Make it fucking brutal.”

Chris's eyes light up like a mirrors catching the sun. “Oh, perish the fucking thought, Toby. We ain't hurting no one.” His face breaks like glass into a smile that belies his words. “We're fucking philanthropists. We're gonna organize a family reunion.”

*

They fuck again in the shower. Tobias feels a sudden, desperate urgency to grasp that feeling, that pure fucking _freedom_ that he felt the previous night, drunk as he's ever been and getting his brains fucked out. If he can just feel it sober, he'll know that it was real—and if it's real, then Schillinger is as good as fucked already, obliviously bunking down in a house rigged to implode on top of him because he's too fucking inbred to even realize that Tobias doesn't live here anymore. Either Schillinger is expecting a pussy little bitch or Schillinger is expecting indiscriminate madness: progress is anathema to a man like him, personal and political both, and he is fundamentally incapable of imagining an entirely new and improved Beecher, wholly self-made and untouched by all of the sick shit that was supposed to have broken him. If that feeling is real, then Schillinger will never see them coming.

 _What would_ he _never do?_ Tobias decides to make this his mantra as he ambushes Chris in the shower after shaving and brushing his teeth. The 'he' in question wavers between Schillinger and two or three different versions of himself, so he decides to refine: _what would he never expect me to do?_ But the ambiguity is still there as he kneels down and takes Chris's dick in his mouth, and as Tobias closes his eyes against the steady stream of water pouring down in his face, his mind's eye cycles through figures from his past staring down at him disapprovingly, starting with Schillinger, moving on to Genevieve, and ending with himself, meek and pathetic, gazing with downcast eyes through enormous wire-framed glasses. It's within reach now, he's sure. He almost has it. He grabs his own hard dick and jerks himself along with the movements of his mouth. _Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you_ , he thinks at each figure in turn. He lifts his free hand to Chris's hip and urges him to step backward, allowing Tobias to look up without pressurized water shooting toward his eyes. He takes his mouth off of Chris's dick and Chris's eyes open and fall upon him.

“I love you,” Tobias says. His words disappear down the drain with the rushing water.

“What?” Chris says, urging Tobias's mouth back to his dick.

“I want to fuck you,” Tobias says, louder this time.

Chris tilts his head, in surprise or appraisal. “Do you?” he says. 

Does he? Tobias slides his hand around to Chris's ass, squeezes—“Yes.” 

“Tell you what.” Chris widens his stance and grasps the top of the shower door with his left hand. The fingers of his right hand graze through Tobias's hair. “You swallow and you can do whatever the fuck you want to me, how's that sound?”

Sounds great, actually. Sounds like a fucking plan. Tobias nods as much as he can with Chris's hand tightening it's grasp on his hair. 

Chris keeps the hold tight until just before he comes, like he's tempting Tobias to take advantage of the nearby drain and relinquish his claim on Chris's ass. He opens his palm and slaps wet tiles behind him loudly, sending droplets of water flying into Tobias's face as come gushes down his throat. Tobias jumps at the noise, letting the cock spring free of his mouth, spilling the remaining yet-to-be-swallowed semen. He meets Chris's eyes and answers the look of triumph that he sees there by leaning forward and licking along Chris's thighs, dabbing at Chris's abdomen with his tongue, collecting all the stray drops he can find. It doesn't taste as bad as he remembered. When he thinks about what's to come, feeling Chris's ass under his hands, he barely tastes it at all.

True to his word, Chris is pressing his palms to the wall and his ass to Tobias's erection the moment that Tobias is on his feet. Tobias has never been in this position, not even with a woman, not even Genevieve: not this _particular_ position. A completely new experience: isn't that appropriate? Isn't that fucking perfect? 

So prepare yourself and push in—hey, slowly now, _slowly_. “Holy _shit_.” Close your eyes: who do you see? Nobody—correction: nobody recognizable—a formless being, raw and tender. Open your eyes and look behind you, maybe you can catch sight of it: your old skins, all of them, rinsed off, melted away, disappearing down the drain. Close your eyes: you can push harder now. You can go faster, without all that weighing you down. See how good that feels? “ _Fuck_ yes.” 

A noise, strangled as through unsuccessfully repressed, rips Tobias's awareness out of the depths of his own mind like an exorcist’s incantation. Panic takes him over: stop, _stop_. “Did I hurt you?” At this moment it seems like the worst thing he could possibly do. 

“Me? Fuck no.” But Chris's voice is strained and there's the slightest hint of pink in the water that swirls down the drain as Tobias pulls out and backs up. “Hey.” Chris sounds genuinely alarmed. “What the fuck do you think you're doing?” 

“You don't want me to stop?”

“No,” Chris says. “Don't stop.” There's a different kind of strain in his voice now. Tobias hesitates.

“ _Please_.” 

“Okay.” Tobias steps forward. “Okay.” He raises tentative hands to Chris's hip.

“Just—,” Chris says. Tobias jerks his hands away. Chris reaches back, takes the hands, wraps them around his waist. “Wouldn't complain if you slowed the fuck down a bit. Just sayin'.” He reaches back again and rubs Tobias's cock until it's hard against his ass again. “Been quite a time since I stood on this side, you know?”

No. No, he didn't know. _Does Chris feel it too?_ Tobias had wondered that the previous night, but Chris's feelings had been far from his mind. Here's that question again, translated into honesty: _Does Chris realize how he's making me feel?_ Or maybe, a little more fairly: _Does Chris understand how he's changing me?_ Chris is a catalyst, a force of nature: that which changes yet is never itself changed; yet Tobias is fairly certain that the Chris Keller who made a sport of breaking his balls once a week back in his most recent previous life would have considered this thing right here as something—maybe the only thing—that he straight-up _did not do_ , at least not if he had a choice in the matter. But here he is, nonetheless, groaning “yeah, like that,” as Tobias fucks him nice and slow, his dick miraculously hard considering that Tobias can still taste his semen in the back of his throat.

 _Does Chris feel it too?_ Well, it sure doesn't seem like much of a stretch—seems like it would explain a whole hell of a lot actually. Let's be honest here: a man willing— _eager_ , really—to abandon even the dregs of a life on some quest to help a man he only recently met avenge a woman he's never even seen can't just be following his dick, however powerful a force that might seem at the present moment. No, there's got to be something—a demon on his back, a ghost haunting his dreams, or maybe just good old-fashioned hatred of that asshole in the mirror—something from which Tobias provides a refuge, or a way out.

Tobias feels a sudden overwhelming tenderness. “ _Fuck_ , I love you.” He kisses Chris's neck, his ears, his cheeks, angling for a mouth that remains tilted just out of reach. 

“You want to fuck me harder, that it?” Chris eventually replies. Tobias hesitates. Chris shoves his ass back hard against Tobias's dick. “Maybe it should hurt a little,” he says and does it again. “What's the point if it doesn't, right?” 

“Like this?” Tobias bites Chris's neck as he pushes harder into him, reaching around as he does so to grab Chris's dick. He strokes Chris in time to his own slow, steady thrusts.

“ _Yeah_ , like that,” Chris says. “Harder.”

Tobias digs his heels into the floor of the bathtub for leverage. His footing is precarious on the wet, slippery surface and he nearly falls on his ass more than once on the upthrust. The cut on his foot throbs and stings as each push pulls the skin further apart and squeezes out blood in little spurts. He rests his head on Chris's upper back and feels it rise and fall in time with his own as the two of them hiss and gasp their breaths through clenched teeth. Chris is right: this should hurt a little. Fuck, this should hurt a lot: this should feel like bones being stripped and broken, rearranged and reset into a studier, interlocking framework—“Transformation is hard,” as that little caterpillar decorating the wall of his shrink's waiting room likes to say. (“But it's worth it!” says the butterfly in the adjacent photo.) They're getting off easy with aches and a teaspoon's worth of bloodshed. 

Tobias has that thought in mind as Chris suddenly grips his wrist like he's trying to snap it like a twig in his hand, and it keeps him from pulling away; he responds instead by biting softly at Chris's shoulder, neck, ear, the bites smoothly transitioning into kisses as Chris's grip loosens from a painful vice to a tolerably firm clasp. Chris's inhibitions have lowered enough that he turns his head without prompting and accepts kisses eagerly, repeating Tobias's own words—“ _Fuck_ , I love you”—into Tobias's mouth, like he's trying to return them to where they belong; now that that's settled, now that they're all squared up, finally the morning's events can advance toward their inevitable conclusion: Chris's hand covering Tobias's and spurring it toward faster and rougher strokes, Tobias struggling to stay on his feet as he fucks Chris with an enthusiasm altogether ill-advised for a rendezvous taking place over slick and polished acrylic, and not a sliver of awareness between them of anything beyond the urgent needs to come and to make each other come. 

It happens suddenly and in quick succession—Chris first and then Tobias, driven over the edge by the surprising turn on of Chris's dick pulsing and spilling in his hand. It happens and finally Tobias _feels_ it: pure singing freedom, exactly as he felt the night before—better, even, certain as he is now that Chris is sharing the experience. Everything washes away in that moment: ghosts and memories, pretence and affectation, who they thought they were and who they want to be. In the wake of it, only the physical reality remains: two men, naked, holding on to each other as cold water pours down on their bodies. 

They stay that way for a long while.

*

Now, once again, a story begins—or does it? It seems that we join it already in progress: two men riding on the back of a single motorcycle, driving along the highway, halfway between the city and the back woods. Their faces are hidden behind the visors of their helmets. Their saddlebags are packed lightly, likely with only what they consider essentials; glass bottles can be heard clinking together inside, muffled slightly, perhaps by clothing in which they've been wrapped for safekeeping. They are, from this vantage, the very picture of American freedom, unburdened as they are by baggage of either excessive possessions or a concrete identity, their origin a vague direction rather than a specific place. 

Every so often, however, when conditions are right, when all other vehicles seem to disappear for a stretch and there's a nice little rest area into which to pull off, the bike makes a pitstop and they both take a piss and the man riding bitch lifts his face mask just enough to take a swig from one of those bottles in the saddlebag, wrapped up as suspected in an old t-shirt. If the road stays clear long enough then the helmets come off, followed, occasionally, by a little bit more: a jacket or a shirt, a belt. They speak little and keep these encounters brief, rarely stopping outside of them. Likely they are extremely hungry and tired; almost certainly their continued alertness is chemically induced. 

They keep travelling, long into the night. Longer than they should. They ride like they're on a mission.

Eventually, though, despite themselves and despite whatever cocktail is contained within those pills that the driver keeps popping in his mouth like candy at every red light—eventually, they have to stop. Eventually, they have to find that seedy little motel waiting for them way out in the middle of nowhere, pull in under that flickering vacancy sign, and take their show off the road.

*

“I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date.”

Tobias observes the display of the digital clock blink soundlessly from 6:59 to 7:00—not nearly as satisfying a transition between the hours as the dual click of hands on an analog clock. The sound of your freedom ticking away should be literal, he thinks, tangible; but perhaps Tobias is just being old-fashioned. That won't do; he should work on that.

“You say something?” Actually, it's more like: “ _mmm...you...say some...nn?_ ” but Tobias gets the idea, though he's not sure of the answer: he didn't realize that he was speaking aloud. Another thing he needs to work on, he supposes.

“Dr. Henry,” he says. “My shrink,” he clarifies when Chris makes a groggy and indistinct noise that could be interpreted as an inquiry. “My court-mandated psychiatrist. Every Friday, seven o'clock, his first appointment of the morning—'Let's get this hour in bullshit-limbo out of the way so that we can get the fuck on with our otherwise productive days,' was the line of thinking there, I'm guessing.” Tobias gestures at the clock: “Seven-oh-two. Well, well.” He laughs. “Guess it's back to jail with me.”

Chris is suddenly awake—very awake. Wide fucking awake and looking at Tobias with the wounded eyes of the betrayed. “You leaving me, Toby?” 

“What?” Tobias lets out a laugh consisting of nerves and surprise and no humour at all and he watches Chris's expression morph slowly from naked hurt to barely-contained anger. “No,” Tobias says. “No—fuck no. It's one appointment, right? Look: my parole officer fucking loves me—I've been a model parolee. He's not some hardass about to bring the hammer down on a grieving widower and father of three for a single missed appointment.” Tobias cringes as he hears himself scheming to use Genevieve's memory as a get-out-of-jail-free card, but he knows as he speaks the words that he's been counting on the pity of those in charge of his fate like another person might depend on tomorrow's paycheck to pay back today's loan. He tries not to think of another time when he made the same assumption: the cunt was an anomaly, and even she came to her senses with time. (Too much time to save him but that doesn't matter anymore, does it?) 

At least his callous words manage to elicit a desirable response from Chris, who smiles warmly and reaches out to touch his hair. “Yeah,” he says. “You wouldn't do that to me, would you?”

“Fuck, Chris, no offence, but that's the least of my worries: I wouldn't do that to my _kids_.” 

And just like the changing of the hour on the face of a digital clock, the transition between Chris's expressions is instantaneous and invisible: smiling, _blink_ ; rage, _blink_ ; smiling once again. Tobias barely catches that it changes at all, but the shift in Chris's mood registers in his mind like a subliminal message delivered via a single image snuck in between two frames of a film. 

“I mean, it would kill them to lose me again so soon under normal circumstances.” Why is he explaining this? Of course Chris understands—Chris has always understood him, better than anyone. Feeling ridiculous, he nonetheless continues: “But after losing their mother like that? I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, can you imagine?”

Chris is lying on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes fixed on the ceiling like he can see right through it into the dim morning sky. “I've been thinking,” he says. “Say shit goes down in our favour and daddy's little dirtbags end up nestled safe and sound in their father's forgiving arms—everything clean and tidy, you know? No more Aryans on your ass. What then? I mean, you got any plans for the future, shit like that?”

Tobias considers this. The immediate answer is “no”, but it troubles him to admit this. Nothing has ever felt more real to him than the boundless sense of freedom that Chris provokes; his future has never seemed more open and unrestricted, his to make what he will of it. 

_So, Toby: what, exactly,_ will _you make of it?_

Such an obvious question to have never occurred to him.

_Don't waste it, now._

Tobias lies down and joins Chris in contemplation of the unseen sunrise, his own hands folded in front of his eyes instead of behind his head. If he spreads his fingers wide enough he can spy Chris through the cracks between them, his diligent focus on the ceiling steady and unbroken. Is he still waiting for an answer, or has he given up? Perhaps he is attempting to craft an answer of his own.

_What then, Chris? Any future plans?_

Tobias doubts that Chris is the type to have future plans. No, Chris doesn't exist beyond the moment—he will live and die in a day and spring fully-formed into the world from nothing the next morning. Perhaps the freedom he embodies is less about knowing the possibilities inherent in his future than about not really giving a shit about them one way or the other.

Tobias closes his fingers, letting Chris disappear from his vision and from his mind. In the darkness between his hands and his eyes, a series of images unfolds: driving on a road and driving off a road; a mirror that displayed no reflection and a mirror that reflected an indistinct, shadowy nothing of a face. He recognizes them from a dream both deeply important and barely remembered. He tries to conjure another image that he infers should be next in the series: a mirror reflecting the stark reality of whatever's in front of it, without omission or embellishment. Of course, such an image fails to surface. Tobias sighs and rubs his eyes. “I guess,” he says, because he needs to break this silence somehow, and then he trails off, turning onto his side. Chris's body remains still but his eyes move—slightly, just enough to meet Tobias's own, but it's enough to shift his expression from distant to expectant. 

Well, fuck: now he _has_ to think of an answer. 

“My kids,” he blurts out, the first thing he thinks of with their conversation from minutes earlier still fresh in his mind. “I want to be a good father.” Tobias says this just to say something, _anything_ , but as he speaks the words they become truth. He speaks and in his mind's eye he conjures their faces and the image surfaces instantly, filling him with an emotion the precise opposite of that which Chris makes him feel: something akin to duty, to obligation, but lacking the implication of a burden that so often accompanies those concepts, leaving a sense of wonder in its place—if his own future feels wide open, then imagine _theirs_ , exponentially greater in possibilities.

“That's good,” Chris says, finally turning to face Tobias, propping himself up on one elbow. “Good for you. Hey, you need any help on the single parent front you don't hesitate to ring me up, huh? That shit's a full time job in itself, or so I hear.” 

“Yeah, right.” Tobias laughs. “I think I'll manage, thanks.” 

“I mean it,” Chris says. He runs his hand down Tobias's arm, shoulder to hand, and squeezes his fingers. “I'd like to meet your kids.”

“Yeah,” Tobias says. “Sure.” He looks down at their clasped hands, squeezes back and then pulls away. “So,” he says. “What about you? I mean, do you have any plans?”

“Sure I do,” Chris says. “Let me show you.”

They don't speak of the future for the rest of the morning. They don't speak much at all. 

* 

They're getting closer. They're almost there. Tobias can tell by the subtle changes in the scenery: the likelihood of an American flag adorning any given house's front lawn increasing to near one hundred percent and then dropping off again as the Confederate Flag starts to replace Old Glory as a symbol of the household's allegiance. There's an enormous one functioning as curtains for the office window of the motel in which Chris's Aryan contact has arranged for he and Tobias to meet the Schillinger boys, as good an indicator that they're in the right place as a blinking neon sign spelling it out for them plainly, or as the t-shirt slogan on the man behind the desk who silently accepts Tobias's cash and then calls him a faggot under his breath as he and Chris walk away with a single room key: “WELCOME TO AMERICA” on the front, “NOW LEARN ENGLISH” on the back.

One hour. Tobias is sitting on the bed, watching the clock on the wall: a real clock, ticking down the hours and minutes and seconds until he confronts Genevieve's killers—until he sits down and pretends to make nice with the cold-blooded little Nazi shits who murdered his wife. Fifty-nine minutes.

Forty-five minutes. Chris is rubbing his back. He's talking, softly in Tobias's ear, but who the fuck knows what he's saying? Who the fuck cares? Thirty-eight minutes. 

Twenty-nine minutes and he needs a drink. Twenty-two minutes and he needs a drink. Nineteen minutes and his hands start to shake; he has another drink at fifteen and they stop.

Ten minutes. Nine. Eight. Seven. Tobias feels calm now. Six. Five. He feels downright cold. Four. Three. Two.

One. 

One. One. One. 

Why the fuck had he been expecting a couple of dirtbag junkies to be on time, anyway?

Tobias goes through the entire process of anticipation two more times before the goddamned Hitler youth drag their sorry, wasted asses through the door, almost two hours late. They're drugged to the gills and Chris gives them shit for it, but three hours of drinking away his anxiety has left Tobias pretty fucked up himself—if Chris is looking for back-up, he won't find much beyond a red-eyed, unfocused glare from the surly drunk sitting in the corner. Seems to do the trick well enough, though—little Hank and Andy cast nervous glances in Tobias's direction every so often, always looking away the moment that he meets their eyes. He hopes that the cultivation of an unsettling atmosphere will suffice for his contribution to the proceedings, as he is unable to follow the conversation in any meaningful way. One second Chris is laying into the kids hard for not taking the very generous once-in-a-lifetime opportunity they've been offered seriously enough; Tobias blinks and Chris is beaming forgiveness at them in the form of a wide, toothy grin: “Oh, that? That was just some good-natured ribbing,” that grin says. “We're all friends here, right?” And the boys see that smile and they agree: yes, we're friends, you, me and him. (Don't know about that guy in the corner, though.) 

Tobias's focus drifts in and out, allowing a handful of key words to penetrate the thick fog of inebriation surrounding his awareness, giving him a vague sense of the tale that Chris is weaving for his captive audience of two:

“Biggest score you've ever seen...”

“A buyer all lined up...”

“Pussy-ass bitch backed out...”

“Too much heat on us...”

“All this product weighing us down, need someone to take it off our hands...”

And what, the boys are wondering by now, does that have to do with us? And Chris is glad they asked:

“So a friend of mine says to me, he says, 'I know these two guys—white boys, you know, real trustworthy, real hard-working—got to fend for themselves lately since their old man got put away, looking to make some money for themselves.' 'These two boys are no pussies,' my friend tells me, 'ain't no way they'd be afraid of a little heat.' And as I'm thinking that things are looking good, my buddy just keeps sweetening the deal: 'And they're connected,' he says. 'Got a whole untapped market up north there—product this good don't usually make it that far out. And it's all other white boys like them, too: folks that'll actually pay for their shit on time, you know what I'm saying?'

“So, my friend here and I, we got nothing to lose, so we decided: we gotta meet these guys. We drove all the way out here to give you guys the first crack at distribution rights, at a hefty fucking discount. And to show our good faith...” Here Chris reaches into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulls out a small transparent plastic bag of something that Tobias didn't know (is grateful to have not known) that he had, tossing it to Hank (or Andy—Tobias can't tell them apart), who accepts it eagerly, immediately taking a hit before passing it to his brother, who follows suit. 

“But mister,” the round-faced brother says, looking and sounding all of twelve years old. “We don't have any money. Like, at all.” His brother scowls and punches him in the arm. “Shut up, Andy,” he says into his ear in what he probably intended to be a whisper. 

That magnanimous, peace-making smile returns to Chris's face. “Tell you what,” he says. “And you better not go blabbing to your friends about this, 'cause I don't want a hundred wannabe little motherfuckers lined up at my front door expecting the same deal, yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Hank. “Yeah,” says Andy.

“All right,” Chris says. “So, here's what I'm offering: no money up front. Yeah, you heard me right: you take the shit off our hands right away, and we don't ask for any cash until you unload it for us. We have a deal?”

Hank and Andy are practically bouncing off the walls in their eagerness to agree that, yes, sir, absolutely: we do indeed have a deal. Tobias feels a small pang of sympathy for their future defence attorney. He feels a small pang for the sizable chunk of his savings account that Chris just lost him, too, but he reminds himself that this is more important than money.

A wave of nausea suddenly overcomes Tobias and he loses the thread again as the other three hammer out the details. Tobias closes his eyes and lets it go, assuming that Chris will fill him in later on the where and the when. He opens them just in time to catch the Schillinger boys scurrying out the door. One of them—Andy, he's fairly certain now—stops to look at Tobias over his shoulder. He seems like he's about to say something, but Chris gives him a shove and nearly slams the door on his ass, clicking the lock and fastening the deadbolt behind him. “I thought they'd never leave,” Chris says as he pulls Tobias into bed with him.

“How'd it go?” Tobias says, holding Chris at arm's length. “Did they buy it?”

“Jesus, you are out of aren't you?” Chris laughs. “Hook, line, and sinker, baby. The Schillinger boys are going home to daddy.”

“Good,” Tobias says. “Good.” Unconsciousness has been creeping up on him for hours and now, alone at last with Chris, safe inside a locked room, he gives in and lets it overtake him.

*

Tobias wakes up alone.

“Chris?” He searches the motel room. It doesn't take long: Chris isn't in bed and he isn't in the bathroom. There: search over. “Chris?” Tobias calls out again anyway. “Chris?” He says it one more time before he wakes up enough to think of just looking out the fucking window: a peak through the blinds at their room's breathtaking view lets him know that the motel's shitty little gravel parking lot is short one Kawasaki—whereever Chris has gone, he's certainly out of earshot by now. 

Tobias searches the motel room again. This time, his search bears fruit: a dirty pair of jeans on the floor, some wadded up bills and loose pills shoved into the front pockets; a small handgun in the drawer of the nightstand that Chris had insisted on bringing in case the meeting went bad; a razor and a toothbrush in the bathroom, neither of them his own; and no room key to be found. All signs point to Chris's eventual return. Tobias breathes a sigh of relief. 

Two hours later and Tobias is panicking again. Chris is out there, alone, without protection. Chris is dead. Hank and Andy made them, those devious little fuckers, playing dumb that whole time. Nazis waylaid Chris outside some late-night fast-food joint and they're on their way here right now. Or maybe the truth is more prosaic: Chris skidded out on the bike, Chris ran a red light, Chris was driving while fucked up and made a bad call, and now Chris is lying in a ditch by the side of the road, dead or dying. 

Calm down, Toby. Have a drink—there, feel better? Yeah, of course you do. Now: look at the clock. Wasn't there something you had to do tonight?

Fuck. _Fuck_. Yes. Yes, there was: pick up the shit. Pick up the shit to sell to the kids to snitch on the kids for selling the shit—hopefully to other pure-white sons of straight-edge Aryan motherfuckers whose fathers will demand some biblical justice meted out by their fair-minded and unbiased leader, just to rub a little more shit in Schillinger's eyes. ( _Aren't you the guy who takes a crowbar to scumbags who try to peddle their poison to our kids? Well?_ )

But that lovely scenario is unlikely to come to pass without any actual poison to peddle. Also worth considering: the unenviable position of disappointing a drug dealer who was expecting to receive a substantial payout tonight—one who is allegedly connected to the most casually ruthless businessman whom Tobias has ever met. If Tobias misses his appointment tonight, Nazis won't be the only threat to his life and the lives of his family; fuck, they might not even be the scariest—the story of Nino Schibetta unwittingly lacerating his own insides for months and learning the truth only after he was already bleeding from every orifice would probably make these badass skinheads piss themselves.

Tobias imagines that happening to him, to Chris, to Gary or Holly—and that settles it: he'll do it himself. He'll drop off the money, he'll pick up the shit, and when he returns to this room Chris will be waiting for him with greasy food, replenishment for their liquor supply and a credible explanation for his absence. 

Tobias grabs an old phone book from the drawer in the nightstand. He grabs the gun too, while he's at it, and shoves it in his coat pocket. He looks up the number of a local taxi service. “It'll be a while, you way out in the boonies and all that,” the dispatcher tells him. “Gonna cost you a big ole' chunk of change, too.” Tobias kindly tells the man that he doesn't give a fuck and to tell the driver that he'll double that chunk of change if gets there in less than an hour. 

He puts down the phone. He waits. 

The driver makes it in fifty-eight minutes.

*

Chris had set up the drop. Something about Chris—all right, all right: _everything_ about Chris—told Tobias that the world of shady characters and back-alley deals was not exactly unfamiliar territory to him; and so Tobias, feeling out of his depth, happily handed him the reins of that particular project. Chris alone spoke with O'Reily, with his subordinates and cohorts on the outside, told them what they needed, haggled over the price, agreed on a time and a date for the pick-up, and all Tobias had to provide was the money. Chris had even suggested that maybe he should pick up the package on his own: “I don't want to scare you, Toby,” he had said. “But there's always a small—and I mean, in this case, more like a tiny fucking microscopic—chance that shit will get messy with this sort of thing. What I'm saying, here, Toby, is that if bullets start to fly I'd rather it be a piece of shit like me that goes down than a tax-paying father of three, you know? You want to sit this one out, leave the heavy-lifting to me, I won't think less of you, okay?”

“I can handle it,” Tobias had responded, equal parts touched and offended. “You might need me. I've got your back.” And that had been that. They were going together. 

“No face to face,” Chris had told him. “It's safer that way. We agree on a place. They drop the product. A little while later, we come by, we pick the shit up, we leave the money. Easy fucking peasy.”

_So easy, even a pussy little bitch like me can do it._

Tobias underestimated the time it would take to reach the agreed-upon drop location; even with the cabbie gunning it for a little extra cash, he gets there later than planned.

“That your friend, buddy?” The driver slows down and gestures toward a middle-aged man in a suit and tie, a few blocks ahead, skulking around the trash can where Tobias was supposed to find the bag of drugs and drop the bag of cash, talking on a cell phone and craning his neck to look around corners, turning his head this way and that. When the man notices the slow-moving cab crawling in his direction, he ducks into a nearby storefront. 

He could, conceivably, be Tobias's “friend”, could be stressed and impatient because there's money at stake here—the suit and tie, though, tell a different story: too respectable for either a standard tough-guy street dealer or a flashy high-roller type, these are clothes that shout “working class civil servant” to the world loud and clear as a fucking bell. “Keep driving,” Tobias says. “Speed up a little—not too much.” 

The driver complies. He follows all of Tobias's subsequent instructions without question or comment, driving skillfully in the convoluted and counter-intuitive patterns the Tobias suggests. He's a quick study. “I'm thinking it's safe to say we're alone, buddy,” he says after half an hour. “How 'bout I drop you back at that luxury resort where I found you at, huh? You can send me home to my wife a little bit richer than I would otherwise be, and a little more inclined to tell one and all what a dead-boring, downright _uneventful_ , shift I had this here night, should it ever come up in the future. That sound about fair to you?”

“Yeah, sure,” Tobias agrees. “Sounds just great.”

*

A light is on in the motel room. Tobias sees it as the cab pulls into the parking lot and he almost panics and insists, once again, that the driver keep driving, keep driving just a little longer— _no, I don't know where, just do it, just_ go. But then he sees—thank god, thank _fucking_ god—that familiar cherry red Kawasaki motorcycle sitting pretty in the parking lot and his world stops spinning so abruptly that he'd probably fall on his face if he was standing up. Tobias counts out the driver's official fee and then slaps another stack of bills on top without counting them, his eagerness to leave the car making him carelessly generous. The driver seems satisfied. “And a good night to you, sir,” he shouts out the window as he drives away.

Tobias hears voices from inside the motel room as he approaches the door. He hesitates, but they sound relaxed, comfortable; he can almost make out one of them, and it is unmistakably Chris. Tobias guesses that their sellers sensed that they'd been set up too—maybe they came here to warn Tobias and Chris, to complete the deal behind closed doors. He wonders who snitched: Hank and Andy, most likely—then again, how did they know about the pick-up tonight? Tobias was too out of it to make note of what Chris did and didn't tell them during their little meeting—maybe he slipped, let them know just a little too much; maybe those vindictive little fuckers somehow recognized Tobias as the thorn in their old man's side and ran squealing to daddy as fast as their little legs would carry them. 

Well, they'll pay for it. No more fucking around. They'll pay for _everything_ , he'll _make_ them, he'll track them down—

—to this motel room, where they are sitting on the bed, beers in their hands, sharing a laugh with Chris. 

“...probably getting the full cavity search right about now,” one of them says.

“Yeah, well he's gonna get a lot worse where he's going, am I right?” That was Chris. Chris said that.

“That's the idea, yeah,” the first guy—Hank, the skinny one is Hank, Tobias remembers—says. The other Schillinger boy, Andy, just laughs along with the others, saying nothing, until he notices something: “The door's open.”

Tobias enters the room, shutting and locking the door behind him. “I came to tell you,” he says, speaking only to Chris, “that someone snitched on us.”

For a moment, they all just stare silently at each other. Finally, Chris speaks: “You sell me out, Toby, that it?” he says. “There gonna be some cops busting in behind you?”

“You know I wouldn't do that to you,” Tobias says. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Toby,” Chris says. Hank and Andy try unsuccessfully to stifle their giggles behind their hands like the silly little boys that they are. “I was worried about you.”

“Like hell you were.” There's a gun in Tobias's hand. Nobody is giggling anymore. “Did they make us?” he asks Chris. He is trying very hard to keep his voice from cracking. “Did they pay you off to fuck me over? Set me up?”

“Yeah,” Chris admits, a little too eager. “Yeah, Toby, I'm sorry, I needed the money. See, Bonnie's real sick—”

“Shut up.” 

What was that unfinished thought that he had as he was entering the room? Oh, right: _I'll track them down and kill them myself_.

“Which one of you held the gun?” he says. Hank and Andy look at him in confusion. Chris throws up his hands and turns away, almost like he's embarrassed. “Which one of you pieces of shit held the _fucking_ gun to my wife's _fucking_ head?”

“Mister, what are you—”

 _Bang._

Chris tackles Tobias, wrenching the gun from his hand. He didn't have to pull so hard. He can have it. Let him have it. _Let him put me out of my misery._

“Toby, I am truly sorry,” Chris says. “And I do love you.” Hank whimpers from the corner. Andy is quiet on the floor. Where are the laughs this time, boys? It's a pretty fucking funny line, Tobias has to admit, the second time around. Timing is everything, isn't it?

Tobias must be laughing himself, because Chris shouts, “I'm serious!” at him. Funny—he thought he was sobbing. Tobias glances at the mirror and sees a big toothy fucking grin on his face—well, fuck: guess he is laughing after all. Guess he's treating Chris's proclamation with all the fucking seriousness that it deserves. 

“Fine,” Chris says. “Fine. You want proof? That what you want, motherfucker? I'll give you proof.” And Chris raises the gun and shoots Hank dead. “That's what you wanted, wasn't it?” he says. 

Tobias shakes his head.

“Don't fucking lie to me, Toby. You wanted those boys dead all along—an eye for an eye, yeah? As long as you don't have to do the dirty work.” He wipes off the gun with his t-shirt and sets it on the nightstand. “Yeah, how about you get this fucking lowlife with nothing to lose to do it for you, huh? And when it's over he can fuck right off to whatever gutter he crawled out of while you search for a nice new mom for your kids, all neat and tidy, yeah?”

Tobias opens his mouth to defend himself. Nothing comes out. Sirens wail in the distance.

“Looks like that ain't happening now, though, is it Toby?” Chris walks to the window and peaks between the blinds. He must not have seen anything, because there's no urgency to his movements as he saunters back to Tobias. “What do you say we get out of here?” he says. “You and me on the open road.” He kisses Tobias on the mouth. The bodies on either side of them don't seem to bother him. “Freedom,” he says. 

The sirens are getting louder. Tobias picks up the gun and trains it on Chris.

“Stop fucking around, Toby,” Chris says. “We gotta move fast.”

“I don't think so,” Tobias says. “I think that you're going to fuck right off to that gutter that you crawled out of. And I'll do the same.” 

“Toby, I love you,” Chris says. “I'm not leaving you.” But as those sirens get louder and louder and Tobias stands his ground, Chris's glances toward the door become steadily more frequent and restless. “Fuck you, then” he finally says and he books it out the door. Tobias opens the blinds and watches from the window as Chris gets on his bike and drives away. He doesn't look back, not even once.

Tobias closes the blinds. He sits on the bed, gun in his lap, and waits. 

*

There is no trial. Tobias pleads guilty. Genevieve's death and an official diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder get him some leniency with sentencing—not much: life instead of death. A return to Oz, this time for good. 

Leniency, indeed.

McManus wants Tobias back in Em City, probably feeling somehow responsible for his return, but Glynn insists on placing him in protective custody from the get go: seems the Aryans are out for his blood. _Sigh_. Same old, same old. He wishes Glynn would've showed the same concern when they were out for his ass, but what are you going to do? 

The thing about protective custody, however, that Glynn, despite his infinite wisdom, might not have considered, is that the inmates there still receive mail delivery. And the mail is still delivered by the Aryans. Tobias gets gobs of phlegm spat at him with every delivery, letters smeared with shit, envelopes ostensibly from his grandmother containing notes that read 'YOUR DEAD BITCH'; in one case, a young Aryan whom he didn't recognize grabbed his wrist as he accepted his mail and attempted to shank him through the bars of his cell: Howell shut that one down good, and no one tried it again.

Tobias begins his stay in PC with a single companion: a young Irish inmate whom he vaguely recognizes as an occasional hanger-on of O'Reily's crew. Tobias tells the guy to thank O'Reily for him, to let him know that a deal's a deal and he'll still get his money, but the kid just looks at him like he's speaking a different language, even after Tobias tries to explain. “Look, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, man,” he says, and it's the last thing either of them says to the other before the guy fucks off back to gen pop, leaving Tobias alone to think long and hard about what that could mean.

Tobias has been in Oz for a month by the time he finds himself face to face with Schillinger himself. He expects more of the same: threats, violence, attempts at humiliation. He gets something worse:

“Why?” Schillinger says.

A million vulgar retorts die on the tip of Tobias's tongue. He waits for elaboration, his body still tensed with the expectation of a fight.

“They were just boys. They had nothing to do with this shit between us.”

“Neither did Genevieve.” 

Schillinger just stares at him momentarily, confused. Unbelievable: motherfucker doesn't even remember the _name_ of the woman he had killed. “Your wife?” he says, finally. “What the fuck does she have to do with anything?” 

“You killed her,” Tobias says. “You killed my wife!” he spits right into Schillinger's face.

Schillinger's face performs an excellent pantomime of surprise and confusion. “Your wife is dead?” he says. “How?”

“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” Tobias says, slowly, as if speaking to a child. “In her car. In the garage.”

“Well, I can't say I blame her,” Schillinger says. “But why the fuck do you think that I had anything to do with that?”

“Revenge,” Tobias says. “For fucking up your parole. For getting out.” 

“You think _that_ was my revenge?” Schillinger says. Light slowly enters his dull eyes as though something delightful is dawning on him. “Oh, Bitcher, you must be even stupider than you look.” An exaggerated parody of laughter comes barking out of his mouth. “You honestly believe that a woman who has to put up with the likes of you, day in and day out, would need to be _forced_ to off herself? That the story you've been telling yourself? That everything was going just hunky-dory between you and the missus until big, bad Vern showed up to throw a wrench in the works?

“Well, _Tobias_ , here's a story for you: 

“A guy goes through life getting everything he wants handed to him on silver platter. But he's still unhappy. Why? Who knows? Maybe in his heart he knows he doesn't deserve what he has, or maybe he's just a whiny little bitch. What does our friend do? Does he admit that maybe, just maybe, his perfect fucking life isn't all it's cracked up to be? Fuck no: that would take balls. No, he just drinks and neglects his problems until they finally grow big enough to fucking kill someone—not just anyone: a fucking baby. At last our golden boy has fucked up so bad that even his blue fucking blood can't keep his ass from being hauled to prison to live among the riffraff that he's spent his whole life shitting on. 

“And here's the part of the story where you'd expect the hero would learn some kind of _lesson_ from all this shit, right? There's no way in hell, you'd think, that this guy, granted a second chance, would just do the exact same things all over again, right?

“ _You'd_ think that, because, just like your buddy McManus, you've been drinking that liberal Kool-Aid that allows you to believe that people are capable of change. What I know, what _my people_ know—the truth that we have been demonized by the liberal media for refusing to deny—is that people, well, they are who they are. It's just in the fucking breeding. And no amount of therapy or rehabilitation or fucking consciousness-raising social programs will ever change that.

“Beecher, I didn't kill your wife. I didn't _have_ to. You want to know what my so-called revenge was? I gave you a goddamn friend. I sent you someone who would give you the slightest encouragement to do what you already wanted to do and then I sat back and watched you destroy _yourself_. Guys like you, Beecher, you're so fucking predictable: one reasonable-sounding argument in favour of _just one drink_ and you take it as permission—no, as the Good Lord's commandment to go hog fucking wild, despite what the other ninety-nine percent of people in your life are telling you. You just can't help it. That's why you're in here: no fucking discipline. That's why you _belong_ here.”

Schillinger just keeps talking, but Tobias doesn't hear it. He's stuck. “A friend?” he says.

“Keller,” he says. “Try to keep up, Beecher. Owed me a favour, from the way, _way_ back. Wasn't supposed to involve my boys, though—cocksucker got a mite bit too ambitious there, forgot his fucking place. He'll pay for that, though. Sooner rather than later, if the chatter on the old prison grapevine pans out. Look in your eyes says maybe you'll wanna help me out with it—that'll be the fucking day, won't it?” Schillinger chuckles and pats Tobias on the arm. Tobias lets him.

“Well, it's been nice chatting with you,” Schillinger says. “But this mail isn't going to deliver itself. Oh, I almost forgot.” He takes an envelope out of his mailbag and hands it over. The return address indicates that it was sent by Tobias's parents.

“What's this?” Tobias says. “Did my mother send me misspelled instructions on how to kill myself in someone else's handwriting again? You know I didn't realize she knew some of those words.”

Schillinger lets out a heaving sigh, the sound of the constant shroud of mocking, sadistic glee that surrounds him dissipating to reveal the figure of a weary old man, rubbing his tired eyes and leaning on his mail cart for support. He shrugs and shakes his head. “It is what it is, Beecher,” he says, turning to walk away. “Take it or leave it.” He doesn't look back. 

Tobias waits for Schillinger to walk out the door and then removes the contents of the pre-opened envelope. He finds two sheets of lined paper, the first one covered in a mostly unreadable scrawl, the second printed with marginally neater and more practiced handwriting, both written in pencil. There is no evidence of forgery in the letters; no indication of any interference at all with any of the envelope's contents beyond the routine checks to which all pieces of prisoner mail are subjected—they are simply letters from his children. 

Tobias spends the rest of his day reading each letter in turn, over and over again, until he thinks has deciphered even the most inscrutable of scribbles, and continuing to reread them until he has committed their contents to memory. At lights out, he tucks them under his pillow—not to hide them, but to keep them close. 

Before he turns in for the night, Tobias goes to the little sink in the corner of his cell to perform his nightly ablutions. As he is rinsing up he catches sight of his reflection in the mirror: in the grey approximation of darkness that passes for night in Oz, his face seems to be composed of a patchwork of shadows; looking closer, though, and long enough, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness, the shadows recede and Tobias is just looking at himself, the same face he's always had, the same eyes that he's never been comfortable looking into very long. He turns away, deciding that it's time to go to sleep.

As he crawls into bed, Tobias reaches under his pillow, reassuring himself that the letters are still there. He hopes that they will give him good dreams tonight; he knows that they probably won't.

Tobias closes his eyes. As he drifts into sleep, he forces his inner monologue into a continual recitation of his children's letters. It doesn't help. Soon enough, he's climbing into the front seat of a car, and though he knows what's coming—the soft thump, the clatter of metal, the screeching of tires—when a voice from somewhere deep inside tells him to go ahead and put his key in the ignition, to stop worrying and press on the gas, to just go, he can't help it, he listens, as he's always done before, and as he will always do again, enacting the same story night after night, from beginning to end, the story that he's trapped inside more than any prison, because it will always be part of who he is. In the story, Tobias climbs into his car; Kathy Rockwell climbs onto her bike. They meet on a sunny street. You know the rest. And though she dies a senseless death, perhaps her loved ones experience a moment of grim satisfaction at the knowledge that her killer won't go free. So the story closes as many do, with the villain carted off to prison where he belongs, and where he'll stay, one way or another, for the rest of his life.

There. The end.


End file.
